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Showing posts from July, 2008

Why Malleswaram Railway Station Still Feels Like Home

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Malleswaram Railway Station — a place that never felt like “just” a station. A few months ago, someone forwarded me a video of an elderly lady speaking about the charm of Malleswaram Railway Station. She mentioned how, whenever her children visit Bangalore from Canada, one ritual remains unchanged. Her son insists on visiting the station, picking up idly from Raghavendra Stores, and eating it right there on the platform. I smiled when I heard that, because for many of us who grew up in Malleswaram, the railway station was never just a transit point. It was a quiet witness to our growing up. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can hear the metallic rhythm of trains slowing into the platform, the echo of announcements bouncing off the tiled roof, the smoky sweetness of roasted maize drifting from the bridge, and the soft warmth of idlies wrapped in paper from Raghavendra Stores. The station was never silent — but it always felt peaceful. For nearly a decade, ...

Life changing moments, really?

Our lives are governed by a random set of fleeting moments that, with the passage of time, it is rather easy to realize which of those are going to assume significance. It is the way we play these moments that propel our way forward, for good or bad. These moments, when viewing in retrospect, define whether we have moved well in time. Of course, whatever happens, we move ahead in time, but the way we move forward rests exclusively on these testing times. As I bring back these nostalgic moments in life, moving back and forth, with a chain of events that has transformed me considerably in the last so many years, I am not sure whether I could have altered my life by taking a different course of action. Looking back, it is easy to say which are the right decisions, and which of those, if I had gone with the other choice, could have got me in a much better position. I say, one or the other, because all important decisions are taken from one of the two choices that we are presented with...

The moving equation

It certainly has been a moving time for everyone in the family.  As I made my way from Boston to Kansas, my brother graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, and found a job in one of the numerous IT companies in India right now, getting placed in Madras .  Like him, a lot of my friends have their brothers shifting away from their respective homes to wherever the placement calls.  A couple of my cousins too are going out to other destinations to excel in their careers.  So, certainly a moving time for all. For me, relocation from Boston to Kansas has certainly not been a huge task.  In fact, it has been quite easy, considering the fact that the cost of living in Boston is much much higher than the mid west states in US.  Not that Overland Park is too economical, but at least, compared to Boston, here, it is easy to cut costs on quite a few things.  Just to give you a comparison, a 2 bed room flat in Boston (in the suburbs) costs about 1500$...

Boston to Kansas: On the Road

It's been quite some time since I wrote anything on the blog. In fact, I have been running busy these days, that I could not find time to keep in touch with the various tech blogs that I have subscribed to, and more importantly, I have not been catching up with the regular blogs of my fellow blogger friends. Honestly, the last few days have been quite hectic, but now, I am in a settled mode, and all set to turn the online world upside down with my write-ups, hopefully, regularly! In spite of all the haphazardly organized ways of my life, I found time (rather quite some time) to catch up with, probably, one of the greatest Wimbledon finals ever. I was glued in front of the television set for seven hours, waiting for the intermittent rains to disperse quickly, as my mind struggled to keep pace with the phenomenal racquet speed generated by Federer and Nadal . It was breathtaking tennis, and it was a treat to watch Nadal outbeat Federer, though it was painful to realize that there...