Last week, Jo and I completed our Seventh wedding anniversary. All these years have gone by so fast, it’s hard to believe we’ve been together for so long. The pandemic has been quite hard on us. While I moved to Bucharest last year, we were waiting for Jo to get her paperwork done. And just as we got her paperwork done and submitted to the Embassy, the Indian govt imposed the lockdown in India, and accordingly the Embassy shutdown, cancelling all appointments.

So I just got my passport reissued this week and I’m amazed how far things have come. I got my passport done close to a decade back when I had to fly to Austin. Back then getting a passport done was a pain - I had applied from Mangalore in Tatkal and since Mangalore didn’t have a tatkal processing system, it was forwarded to the Bangalore passport centre. I still vividly remember the day I visited - I stood in queue at 8am (was told to go early because the counter was open only till 12pm), stood there for hours after some initial confusion on where to go(which lost me a whole bunch of spots) and when I was 2 spots away from reaching the counter, the guy at the counter shut down saying they’re doing for the day even though it was 11:45am. Was so pissed but really couldn’t do anything but go back. The next day I went and stood in the line at slightly before 7 and somehow got through the document submission and had to patiently wait.

I’ve always wanted to go on long road trips, but with both Jo and me working, trying to find a contiguous block of holiday has been rather difficult. With me taking a break and Eid holiday coming during middle of the week, we got a chance to do our road trip. Part 2 continues..

I’ve always wanted to go on long road trips, but with both Jo and me working, trying to find a contiguous block of holiday has been rather difficult. With me taking a break and Eid holiday coming during middle of the week, we got a chance to do our road trip.

With a date set, we next wondered which route to take? We considered Coastal Karnataka(Bangalore - Goa - Mangalore - Bangalore) and Tamil Nadu(Bangalore - Madurai - Kanyakumari - Thanjavur - Chennai - Bangalore), but eventually decided upon Coastal Karnataka after consulting with resident travel expert Ashwin. He also suggested few additional places(OK, he suggested a lot of the intermediate places) and we decided on this route and timeline.

I was going through Google Photos' Rediscover This Day feature and realized that over the past couple of years, a lot of my trips seem to have happened around this time frame.

Part of this was originally posted as a comment to Nithin’s facebook post about today’s news article stating that Cops will send you legal notice if you block an Ambulance. There’s a well known law called Parkinson’s Law which states work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion There are various corollaries on this - and the one which I resonate the most is

I had originally wanted to publish this back in late August when I shifted from Borg Cube to Borg Cube Grande.. ie, my new home.. but #lazybhat happened and I never got around to finishing that.

Since shifting to Bangalore, I’d been staying in a tiny 1BHK house in Murugeshpalya, off Old Airport Road. Back then, I’d chosen this place mainly for it’s proximity to my workplace - at about 4.4km, it takes me an average of 15 minutes to a maximum of 30 minutes to reach office. With 335E plying in copious amounts, heading to office or to Majestic to head back home was quite easy too. 2 years in, I decided to to move to a bigger place, so that things are all set when the inevitable #cpgweds happens.

Attending an interview tends to be a scary, nerve-wracking event for most, me included. It’s like college exam 2.0 - you don’t do anything building up to the event, panic & do a splash and dash the previous night(though in my case, it’s more like “ah, fahgettaboutit”), start wondering and worrying what’s about to be asked prior to the event, with your mind racing about - “what if x comes, oh shit I forgot about y”, the big moment where you stammer, blabber and spit out something and then keep worrying till the results are out.

Last week, I got a call from the HR team asking if I’d be available and willing to come to office on Saturday. The reason? We had a weekend hiring drive and they wanted me(among others) to be an interviewer. My first reaction was - “mm okaaay but I’ve never done this before”(though never is not true, I did take up an interview, but that was for my team & was more of accompany-the-project-leads-and-ask-a-few-questions). This case, however, was different. It’d be a face-to-face interview. With people willing to join the organization. I decided to say Ok. Hey, it’d be a different experience.

2011 was a roller coaster year. Here’s the year in review, in bullet points Sold off my iPhone 3G and purchased a Nexus S Supposed long term US stay gets cut short. 3+ years of work on project gone down the drain. On the upside, learnt quite a lot. Met Manaa in person, after being a very close friend for 6+ years Was elected as Community Moderator for one of the Stack Exchange sites, Super User Wrote my first Chrome Extension to get around WebNonsense crap Bad security practice from the past comes to haunt me.

… for a fortnight, that is.

Although, I was not  strictly Bangalored, barely a week after joining Logica I was asked to come over for Bangalore for 2 weeks for some training sessions. Now since this was a company sponsored training, my travel and accommodation was handled by them.

Reached Bangalore on Sunday, May 1st morning via the Jan Shatabdi Chennai-Mysore train at 10:45am. Ashwin was kind enough to come over to the railway station to pick me up. Headed over to At-home Guest House at Koramangala, which was to be my place of stay for the duration of the visit. With no agenda being set, Ashwin & Me were wondering what be the next thing to do. Ashwin & Me remembered Ashwin Murali ( “Cruise” to avoid any confusions” ) tweeting about TGIF having reopened in Royal Meenakshi Mall, and that’s where we decided to move next.