Shravanbelagola - Bike Trip

"Hampi" i said. Sai approved, and added if not anyone both of us will complete the trip. Ok, that was encouraging, if not Hampi, the probability of breaking out of bangalore was more that weekend. Soon Hampi was ruled out due to lack of crowd. Skandagiri was rejected since night trekking was no longer allowed there. Funny part, looks like few Policemen use it to bribe money from visitors. Even in bangalore, traffic police work with full force on weekends!! Anyway leave that. So the final option was Shravanabelagola - a jain piligrim center. And it was planned to be a bike trip. Exciting (to think)!!!!

The plan was to start early before bangalore wakes up. Sai took the job of disturbing the dreams and accomplished it with perfection. Started at around 6.20AM with free roads and early morning chillness to tackle. The ride was smooth, as the Unicorn and Apache sped at 80 to 90 KMPH till we reached NH4. After that the speedometer wobbled between 90s and 100s and at times above that too. Fun, it was. Can call it madness/risk or whatever. But the fingers had gone numb, felt more like a wood holding on to the clutch and accelerator. Sun popped up slowly and it was battling against the early morning chillnesswhen we reached Bangalore - Mangalore highway. The highway was free,  the silent Unicorn glided at 90-100 KMPH. Cool breeze, early morning sun, a smooth bike, free highway everything was in our favour.  Those bike advertisements are true, you can forget even if it is a girl sitting behind. The four lane road ended, and we took the SH to Shravanabelagola with 18KMs left to cover. We had reached there in exactly 3 Hrs, with 3 pit stops few of which were considerably long.

Finished breakfast and took 10 minutes to reach the top of first peak, Vindhyagiri. ASI has done some work, maintaining the structures, but cementing them has spoiled the architectural beauty. Highlight was the 57ft Gommatheshwara statue. Same story with Chandragiri too. The temple complex also houses few beautiful temples. At the top there was Chandragupta Paduke. After a while came down and started back to bangalore with a full watermelon packed. The journey was once again smooth, till we reached the bangalore in the evening. Back to maddening traffic and pothole filled roads. Anyway a welcome break, it was.

Photos - https://picasaweb.google.com/sskganesan/ShravanaBelaGolaBikeTrip, https://picasaweb.google.com/111446569907392516250/Shravanabelagola?noredirect=1

Work = Life

Ting!!! Ting !!! The little disturbance amidst "Asku Laska" forced me to switch tabs in my firefox and open the gtalk window. Knew, it would be one among the very few privileged people and it was. Had adorned the cloak of invisibility in gtalk, since i felt that it was disturbing my bug fixing rate, the rate at which i find which variable should be set to 0/1 or which if loop needs an extra condition to fix the high priority bug in the C code. The restriction in Gtalk was one among the self imposed restrictions. Anyway the productivity remained constant, as mind found ways and indulged in other activities, while the friendly chats vanished altogether. Anyway back to the conversation windows, it was my close friend Mr.X who had pinged.

me: not sleeping ?
time should be around 1 ?
X: 12:40
X: back to form after long time..
:)
me: he he he he :)
so how is life going ?
X: nowadays its ok.. not much work too. may be damager has to come..
next week sangoodhuradhukune vandhuruvan..
but poor thing is ur qn was how is life.. and i am answering about work..:(
me: ha ha ha...
yeah sad part..

LOL, I would have given the same reply if somebody had asked me about my "life". From that day started cautiously noticing response of people around me for the question "How is life" and it is the same. It starts with what they are working on, the work load, their manager (most of them simply called as moron), how long they stay in office etc etc etc. One thing to feel happy about is, everybody is on the same boat :)

If not work, what is this life all about ? How should we go about living it ? That is one scary question to ask anyone. Because everybody have their opinion about it and the scary part is most of them will try to thrust it down your throat.
P.S. Anyway, this conversation prevented me from deactivating my Facebook account, which i thought was taking up a lot of time.