Outlook

Elephant tracks

This is on the way to Cauvery Fishing camp. The road (if it can be dared called that) was totally broken, with large stones, loose gravel and most of all dangerous sand. Two of the three riders fell down. Both the pillions got down at separate times because the tension got too much. There was a steep fall to the river just on the right. The left had a vertical stone face. It required so much concentration to ride, every single stone to be watched, every single inch on the road ahead to be seen, and thought, how would that react under the tires. I was sweating soaked. And not really from the heat!

When I got back on to asphalt on the main road, I laid down on the road to celebrate being alive. As a recent ad says "Jhooth bolte hain wo jinhe dar nahi lagta."

The best ride ever.

The early worm

(this has to be seen in the original size. Click it)

Waking up early has it's charms!

There is an old joke that went like this. "It is true that the early bird gets the worm. But what about the early worm?"

Affairs in tarmac

The Daily Commute

I have been playing a lot of NFS Most Wanted (Black edition, if you have to know) lately. It is a stunning game, and extremely enticing for a person who cannot spend extended hours at playing his games. Twenty minutes a day is what I spend in a race, and then the next day smile when I see a Lexus LS400 at a parking, even going around to saying, "Baby, you were great last night".

But well, this post is not about NFS. It is about the stretch of road from my home to my office. My daily commute. At night when I am playing NFS, I routinely come across tracks like this.

And then, in the morning, I drive across this.

1.3 kms stretch of a magnificient fort on the left along the road (takes me a minimum of 30 seconds to whizz past). Screeching turns, a drop which you can imagine a Porsche jumping over, a red light whose existence NO-ONE ever acknowledges, and the slow unmindful traffic drudging along.

I cross Tughluqabad every single morning, and it is a pleasure unparalleled to be able to turn your bike at high speeds through the corners. And the feeling of grandeur that I mention here is humbling at the same time. Where in India can one hope to be part of such history every single day of one's lives? These pictures have not completely captured the grandeur of what I am trying to convey here, more because anyone with a camera in delhi around 26th January clicking pictures is presumed to be making a plan to blow up the place soon. So one has to be careful about those sensitivities. These though might help.