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Category: Fun

October 20, 2015

Trek to beautiful grasslands of Kudremukh

by viggy — Categories: experience, social, Uncategorized — Tags: Balegal, kudremukh, mullodi, NatureAdmire, somavathi, Trek, triphippie — Leave a comment

Beautiful Grasslands of Kudremukh

After looking at the beautiful images of hills with stretches of grasslands, I always wanted to trek to Kudremukh. Me, Farrah and her colleague, Janaki booked our seats through TripHippie which had a fixed departure available for Oct 17th-18th weekend for Rs. 3500/- per person. The organizer of the trek was Nature Admire, which is run by Dev Balaji. I had met him couple of days before to talk about collaboration between TripHippie and Nature Admire. He has a vast experience and network in this domain and there is lot to learn for us from him. After booking through TripHippie, we received the detailed itinerary from Dev. We left for Kudremukh from Bangalore on Friday night around 10:00 pm in a tempo traveller. We reached Balegal by morning 7:00 am on Saturday. From here, we went to Mullodi in Jeep ride of 8 kms that I will never forget. It was only in videos that I had seen driving in such roads but this route will ensure that all the bones in your body is shook. The drivers here are skilful and had full control over the vehicle during the drive. After reaching the base camp at around 8:00 am, we quickly freshened ourselves and had breakfast. We then packed food items that we had brought from Bangalore along with lunch that was provided to us to carry along with other necessary items like torch, sprays and water bottles. Though as per the itinerary, we were supposed to be back to base camp by 6:00 pm and hence torch would not have been necessary, it later proved to be very helpful. With this, by 9:00 am, we were all set to start the trek.

One of the many streams during the trek with crystal clear water

We were quickly briefed by Balaji about the trek and do’s and don’ts during the trek. We had a local guide with us, who would lead the way for our group. There were more than 100 other trekkers who had come along with various other groups, so the trek route was crowded. The trek is 8 kms to the peak, with close to 4 kms of trek where you have steep climbing which is very tiring. However there are lot of places where you cross the streams with water so pure that you can just drink it directly. Again this was a first experience for me to just drink water directly from the stream.

View of the Kudremukh Peak

It was very sunny and we were soon tired even just after 1 km of trekking. Balaji kept inspiring us that we will soon get comfortable once we get acclimatized to the new environment. Till now, we hadnt seen the actual peak that we had to reach. After around 1.5 kms of trek, Balaji showed us the Kudremukh Peak.

Image from Wikipedia explaining the name of the peak, kudremukh

Kudremukh in Kannada means horse-face. Though a little difficult for me to imagine, others seem to get it easily imagine the peak as a horse face. The sight of the peak kept inspiring us apart from the sight of lush green grasslands. We were expecting rain and hence wanted to complete the trek before evening after which it would be really difficult to trek back if it rains. The local guide kept trekking easily and waiting for us to catch up with him. Our trekking team had people with varied experience with us being the complete newbies and a couple who had even visited Annapurna Base camp in Nepal. So they kept guiding us and helping us. Balaji kept reminding us to take some short breaks and have bananas, nuts and chocolates that we had brought along with us.

Our Trekking group, fully charged while climbing a steep path

By around 1:00 pm, we were completely exhausted with close to 2 kms still to go. We had maintained a constant pace of 25-30 mins per km. Balaji stayed at the end encouraging us to keep moving forward. Looking back at the distance we had covered also kept pushing to achieve the final 2 kms to reach the peak. Also, the cloud had started becoming more dense and we expecting rain, we kept moving forward. By this time, a part of our group had already gone quite ahead.

Almost at the peak, we were able to see the clouds below us

The last 500m is almost plain and we were thrilled for having reached the peak. We were amidst the clouds and it was a great feeling of achievement and satisfaction.

Clouds at the peak

A beautiful feeling to be amidst the clouds

We finally reached the peak at 2:00 pm after 5 and half hours of trek where others from our group were already waiting for us and taking rest.

TripHippie and NatureAdmire team at the peak of Kudremukh

From the peak where clouds were below us

We had the puliogre that we had got from base camp as lunch along with some oranges that we had carried from Bangalore. We also took a small nap of 10 mins to rest our legs. We then started our downhill trek at around 3:00 pm. Though we had expected it to be difficult due to some steep paths, we soon understood it was much easier to have climbed than to go down. Our joints and toes soon started to feel the pressure. We had thought that though difficult, we would still be faster in climbing downhill and hence would reach the base camp by around 7:00 pm with 4 hours to trek downhill. However one of our group mates sprained her leg very soon, just about 2 kms from the peak and it slowed us down. By around 6, were still at least 5 kms far from the base camp and it was already getting dark. This was where the torches that we had carried along helped us and we continued trekking downhill with the help of torch light. We had Balaji who had waited for us before the start of the dense forest. We would have definitely got lost had he not waited for us there. He kept assuring us that we keep moving slowly and carefully. We did not want anyone else to get hurt by twisting or falling. The steam which had been very welcoming while climbing up were now numbing cold. We still had to cross them and since we did not want to risk slipping on stones, we decided to walk through the numbing cold stream. It was our first experience trekking in evening through a dark forest and we were all scared except for Balaji who knew the route very well.

By around 9:00 pm, completely exhausted, we reached the basecamp and joined other members from our group. The dinner was ready along with the tents and sleeping bags for our night stay. Completely refreshed with the experience of the trek, we enjoyed the dinner and went to sleep in the cosy.

The next day, Sunday, we got up at around 9(we were supposed to get up by 6 :)) and visited the Somavathi falls. Since we were already late, we just enjoyed in the falls for an hour or so and rushed back to basecamp to pack our bags. Since most of us were exhausted from the trek, we had decided to go back to Balegal in a Jeep rather than trek back to Balegal which was the plan as per the itinerary. We also decided to skip visiting the Horanadu Temple and just stop at the Tea Estate for a while.

Beautiful Tea Estate

Valley between the tea estate

After this, we reached Kottigehara where we stopped for lunch. We enjoyed the Neer dosa being served there in a local hotel. Though we were expecting our body to ache due to the heavy trekking that we had done the previous day, surprisingly we did not have any such issues. Relieved we enjoyed the movies that was being played in the cab. We reached back to Bangalore at around 8:30 and as always were welcome with a huge traffic at Malleshwaram Maramma Circle. From the crystal clear water from streams and grasslands surrounding us, we were now back amidst the concrete structures of Bangalore.

Overall the trek to Kudremukh was a great experience and my first through TripHippie. I notice close to 150 more packages that are currently hosted in TripHippie which I need to experience.

October 12, 2015

June 6, 2015

Priviliged – Not by hard work but by chance

by viggy — Categories: experience, social — Tags: college, girls, oppresion, privilige, prof — Leave a comment

I feel I am a very priviliged person. Born to Hindu parents in a country where majority is Hindu. Born to brahmin parents where the society is castiest and brahmins are considered the upper-caste. Born to educated parents in a country where being literate itself is an achievement and formal education still unreachable to many. Born as a son of government employee at a time when government still had some socialistic views and hence took good care of their employees and my education was taken care of.
With all that, I have one of the major priviliges something that close to 50% of our country’s population doesnt have. I was born as a boy. As you might have observed, all these priviliges were bestowed upon me even before I could stand on my own feet or before even earning a bead of sweat on my forehead. I was born into these priviliges just by chance. I could easily have been born in war-torn Libya or Iraq. As easily I could have been in one of the dalits family having to run from their homes thanks to the outrage by upper-caste men. Or could have been born to a Muslim family suffering the riots of Gujarat in 2002.
Today I mention this privilige of being a boy to share my experience of the evening. In a rare moment, me along with my professor and couple of his other research students decided to go out for the evening snacks. As we were walking towards the junction which was around 500m away, we saw a large crowd at a distance. This crowd had gathered for the results of a local gram panchayat election as just behind our college was the counting booth and people supporting various parties had gathered to get the results. As we walked, my prof noticed couple of girls who were his students returning back hesitant to pass through the crowd. Realizing why they were returning, my prof asked them to join us as we would also anyways be passing the crowd.
This was something that kind of struck me as it has never been in my life that I felt scared to pass through the crowd. Esecially this is an area just beside our college, something which we regularly pass through. And yet these students feared just passing the crowd which had peacefully gathered on both the sides of the street. I just snickered at them telling them that why they should fear passing through as someone who are about to become an engineer. They just kept quiet.
After reaching the junction and crossing the signal, my prof asked these students who were laughing amongst themselves casually what made them laugh. The girls innocently mentioned that at the other end of the signal, there was a boy who had been following them since afternoon. They did not know him at all but he was following them for close to 3 hours since afternoon when they had caught a bus to college from Majestic(the main bus terminus). My prof was shocked that the girls had not mentioned this to him earlier and he asked me to come along with him and we confronted the boy. It was evident that this boy was following the girls. My prof threatened the boy of consequences if dares to follow them again and he asked me to take a photo of the boy from my mobile. Just as I was about to do it, the boy got scared and ran away.
The girls were relived. But it was a strange experience to me. Something thanks to my priviliges will never have to go through myself. I am sure this experience will leave a mark on those girls too. May be add to their fear or hopefully remove some fear and encourage them itself to confront.
Born in a patriachal society has given me lots of privilege, but today’s incident reminded me that my priviliges which have been bestowed on my just by chance are also part of oppression on the someone else. The only way forward for the society is to remove this oppression and for that a major role would be of those priviliged to give up their priviliges, not as charity but because they never earned these priviliges.

May 5, 2015

When government is the oppressor, corruption is the way of living

by viggy — Categories: social, Uncategorized — Tags: bus, conductor, corruption, passenger, society, ticket — Leave a comment

As usual, I took a KSRTC bus to college today. As usual, I bought the ticket from the conductor and as usual he wrote the change that he owed me on the back of the ticket. After one stop from where I had boarded, the Ticket Checkers boarded the bus. These are people who do kind of surprise visit to the bus and check if the conductor has given tickets to all passengers and if there are passengers who are travelling without buying a ticket.
Generally, passengers and bus conductors have aversion towards each other. I used to think that this may be because the conductor doesnt give change properly, or may be rude in the way he/she talks to passengers. Conductor also doesnt sometime stop the buses on the stop. I had always thought that it was due to these daily friction that passengers dont like the conductor.
Today as usual, the Ticket Checkers checked all the tickets of the passengers. The conductor was very prompt and had given tickets to all the passengers. Hence the Ticket Checkers did not have any complain against him and hence he did not have to bear any penalty. Usually if any person is found travelling without tickets, the conductor has to pay the penalty of Rs. 300 from what I know.
After the Ticket Checkers left, conductor like a student who had just passed his exam, sighed. Some of the passengers started talking amongst themselves and with him, saying that Ticket Checkers were very disappointed, they did not get any reasons for penalty and during the discussion, I could see amazing solidarity of the passengers with the Conductor. He also was talking to them nicely and passengers were abusing the Ticket Checkers as people who always want to loot, etc.
This is when I realized that the reason why there is aversion between passengers and conductor is not because of bad behaviour or something. It is because for the passengers, he is the face of the oppressor called government. Everytime there is a hike in ticket prices, everytime they have to travel in fully packed buses, they blame the government and they see the conductor as the person representing government.
In that moment when Ticket Checkers came to check ticket, Conductor also became a part of the oppressed and hence they were easily able to show solidarity with him. This solidarity takes the form of corruption, when the government employee, to a large extent oppressed himself joins hands with the general public.
People blame the traffic police who catch them for violations as they see them as the face of the government. However the same police may becomes a friend when he gets the job done going against the rules as there is also on the side against the government.
Say politicians who earned crores of ruppee in Coal Scam may be corrupt but because they get the work done through the government for the local people, their corrupt acts are completely ignored because for people these are people just cheating the oppressor.

January 13, 2015

January 1, 2015

December 29, 2014

Dead person and a used tissue paper

by viggy — Categories: experience, God, social — Tags: che, dead, gandhi, god, patel, person, tissue — Leave a comment

A dead person is as useless as a used tissue paper. Its existence has no consequence, and for the lack of proper word that I can think of, no respect. If you look at the way people treat a dead body in the name of the final rites, its shameful. A person who would have been a big bully would now be moved around like a sack of bag. Not only physically, even ideologically his/her ideas would be modified, distorted etc as wished and the dead person cant defend it.

How often have you heard this statement, “Aaj agar _____ Hote?”, “If he was alive, he would have …..?” Anyone would say this and there is no way the dead person can defend himself/herself.

We have two great examples for this. Gandhi and Che Guevara. With 100s of schemes tied to his name, lakhs of roads, auditoriums, etc Gandhi is used in this country by anyone and everyone. I am sure ‘If he was alive, he would have sat on Anshan in retaliation’. See I just did that. With Modi’s Cleanliness campaign to Congress’s MNREGA everybody has made use of him. On the ground, we have nationalists who hate him, call him names for supposedly being responsible for Partition. I do not have much idea about him but this seems to be an interesting debate about ‘Relevance of Gandhi in today’s world‘

Che’s picture is a very common picture to everyone, most seen in T Shirt prints. In a recent debate about Copyright, Copyleft and incentive to publishers, one of the speakers mentioned that ‘If copyright helped the original creators, Che would have been the richest person for his own image.’ It is appalling how his image is used/morphed/remixed into any design and again the poor revolutionary who went ahead and challenged some of the most powerful countries in his time is helpless and cannot defend himself now.

The Iron Man, Vallabhbhai Patel with the Statue of Unity also faces the same fate. Whether he himself would have agree to spend Rs. 2000 Crores on his statue in the name of Nation’s unity is an interesting question.

The more popular the person is, the more is the dilution and corruption of his/her ideology.

What is interesting is that Almighty GOD also faces the similar humiliation. Things that have been done and is being done in name of GOD is truly shameful? But the almighty not able to defend himself/herself, infact needing people to defend himself/herself makes one doubt his/her capabilities.

September 23, 2014

Event Report: Public Screening of Internet’s Own Boy

by viggy — Categories: FSMK, social — Tags: Aaron, Act, campaign, FSMK, goonda, Lawrence, Liang, Screening — Leave a comment

As the first activity of We The Goondas Campaign, we organized a public screening of Internet’s Own Boy, a biography of Aaron Swartz, a hacktivist in US who worked actively to promote internet freedom and in a true sense, the first martyr of Freedom of Internet/knowledge movement. We The Goondas campaign motive is to raise awareness amongst public about the recent amendment to Goonda’s Act which was passed by Karnataka Legislative Assembly and then when there are sufficient number of people mobilized, we will decide on how to take the campaign forward. The screening was organized in Institute of Agricultural Technologists, Queens Rd, Bangalore on 21st Sept 2014 at 2:00 pm. Over all close to 60 people attended the screening. The screening was followed by a discussion led by Lawrence Liang from Alternative Law Forum on the whole knowledge based movement that Aaron was a major part of and also his role that should be a major inspiration for all of us from the developing countries. Lawrence emphasized on the absurdity of various laws which are being passed across the world to regulate internet. Aaron was a martyr of such an absurd law. With respect to Goonda Act, he talked about how it is completely absurd because it tries to weigh in completely diverse range of people in the same pan, right from people involved in boot-legging, land-grabbers, drug offenders to copyright violators. He emphasized on the point that where else can you find such comparisons if not in absurd laws. Like a statement by Aaron in the movie, Lawrence also emphasized on the fact that books and other content is not just about a certain idea being represented, it is also a representation of the culture and tradition of the society which shouldnt be locked up. He mentioned a question that Suraj, a delhi based, working class boy had asked him, “माना ये किताब आपकि हॆ, इस किताब कि परछाई किसकी हॆ?”(“Even though I agree that the books is yours, who owns the shadow of the book?)”. He mentioned how he was pretty sure that Aaron would have put up all the content of JSTOR into torrent and that was the sole motivation for him to download it and how laws actually stopped him from doing such a generous thing. He mentioned that any law which doesnt allow us to be generous to each other, is not an law to follow. The discussion also led to interesting questions on how the campaign should be taken forward, what we can expect etc. As of now, we currently do not have a clear idea on how to take the campaign forward and hopefully with more and more groups and people joining us, we will be able to come up with the clarity on what realistically can be expected out of the campaign.

Over all, a very good start to the campaign. ALF was very generous to have contributed towards the cost of the hall which was close to Rs. 18,000/- We definitely were not able to mobilize as many people compared to the money put in and hopefully we will be able to do a much better participated event next time.

Photos of the event: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/124841002@N04/sets/72157647495245607/

August 24, 2014

“I will do it again if I have to because fighting against a military government and dictatorship is still something I believe in” – Prof. Mulugeta

by viggy — Categories: experience, social — Tags: ethiopia, freedom, gonewithawind, hope, mulugeta, physicists, prison — Leave a comment

“I will do it again if I have to because fighting against a military government and dictatorship is still something I believe in” This was what Prof. Mulugeta Bekele answered to my question of whether he felt it was worth spending 7 years in jail. A well known physicists in Ethiopia, Prof. Mulugeta Bekele unlike our current Indian ‘scientific intellectuals’ had very clear idea political ideology. Being part of an underground political student organization against the military regime while in his 30s, he feels lucky to have survived after being imprisoned for 7 years. He recalls the fate of many of his colleagues and friends who were simply executed by the regime without any trial or reason given. While trying to imagine what 7 years in prison would be, when they had just been brought to prison and saw a senior colleague being released after 7 years in prison, a friend had remarked to him, it is 1 year of Mondays, 1 year of Tuesdays, and so on. Little did he know at that time that he would have to spend something similar in his lifetime also. Cramped in a room 4 by 4 meters with 50 others, he tells us one of the main pastime of prisoners was to read books smuggled in by previous and other senior prisoners. For close to one year after his arrest, he was tortured by the regime to extract information and then he was dumped into the central prison along with other political prisoners. During this time, he was taken care by senior prisoners who helped him get cured from all the injuries during the torture. After sometime, he himself learnt this and became a therapist himself to other prisoners. Now a well known physicists, he recalls how he was called the therapist inside the prison. As a physics teacher, he continued teaching students even in the prison, some of whom he proudly says, have become very well known figures in the country and abroad.

He told us about a popular true story of Ethiopian Political prisoner. Being in prison for a long time, the prisoner again a student was able to lay his hands on the book ‘Gone with the wind’ by Margaret Mitchell. After having read for more than 3-4 times the same book, he started working on translating the book in Amharic, one of the native tongue in Ethiopia. Since each prisoner got the book to read only for one hour per day after which it had to be passed on to others, after finishing up his time, he announced to other prisoners about his work and started reading out his translation to them. The other prisoners who were deprived of reading such books as they did not know the language were quite thrilled by this idea and started looking forward for more of his translation. Very soon, other prisoners started contributing their cigarette packs to him so that he could use the salvaged paper in it to write down his translations. A very long book in itself, the translations soon turned out to be lot of papers and became difficult to keep it unknown to the guards of the prison. Hence it was smuggled to other prisons through prisoners who were transferred to other prisons. This in turned helped to be spread the story to other prisons. The prisoner, being released after 10 years tried to collect all the translated scripts and papers and published the book. A full story on this can also be read here.

One of the last question that I asked him was whether he became religious and tried to seek God while spending such a long time in prison and being hopeless. He told me that he was never hopeless in prison. He knew very well the intentions behind his actions and he knew he had to do it and it was the right thing. He was very hopeful even while in prison.

With the current status of his country, he is disappointed. Though the military junta has gone and now the country is a democracy, he feels there is little choice still for people and the people in power have their own agendas to fulfil rather than serve the people. Yet he is very hopeful of the future to come.

August 21, 2014

The Boat that rocked and the people who didnt stand up to it

by viggy — Categories: experience, FSMK, internet, social — Tags: copyright, FSMK, goonda, hoffman, pirate — Leave a comment

The boat that rocked is a great movie and Philip Seymour Hoffman has acted wonderfully in the same. What got my interest mainly in the movie is how few politicians who were against the concept of Pop and Rock music were able to come up with legislation that made the boat illegal and yet people instead of standing against it, were just feeling sad and disgusted about the government. The movie at starting states how more than half of the population were interested in Pop and Rock Music and how the Pirate Radio helped to cater to their interest. If you go by market rules, it would mean that this was tremendous market and it would mean many companies would be competing for the same market. However it doesnt seem so. The Pirate Radio was the only one in the market to cater to such a large audience and more importantly it was due to some reason an underground activity. Listening to Pop and Rock music seemed to be something bad even though more than half of the population was doing it. Sounds absurd right?

What is more absurd is that all the politicians in the government decide that this should be stopped and they come up with some bad legislation to put an end to the Pirate Radio by making it illegal and announce the date since it will be applied. So what is the most logical thing to do when government comes up with absurd laws which you do not agree with? Stand up against it? In this movie, The Pirate Radio tries to escape from running away because they felt that there was some brilliant and easy way to do it. Not only that, people also keep crying in front of their radio, trying to justify to themselves that Pirate Radio very soon will be gone. Why didnt anybody go to street and fight against it? Well this was in around 1966.

Come to 2014, close to 50 years later. We are told about Mass Surveillance on Internet. We are told government is doing it. We are told there are absurd laws made by government to justify it. And yet people are not coming to streets? Almost everybody uses internet nowadays. Most of your intimate stuff is online, shared with others. Yet nobody seems to care that few politicians are coming up with absurd laws to govern internet and make things illegal just because they cant control it.

Take for example, the state of Karnataka in India. Our Legislators just passed an amendment to an Act which says that if you are a digital offender who causes public disorder, then you are liable for preventive detention under Goonda Act, a draconian act which our constitution allows to ensure public order. This is the definition of “digital offender” as per the amendment. “’Digital Offenders’ means “any person who knowingly or deliberately violates, for commercial purposes, any copyright law in relation to any book, music, film, software, artistic or scientific work and also includes any person who illegally enters through the identity of another user and illegally uses any computer or digital network for pecuniary gain for himself or any other person or commits any of the offences specified under sections 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74 and 75 of the Information Technology Act, 2000.””

Right, so if you download a movie from torrent, ebook from internet or a photo from flickr and use it for your commercial purpose, you are the Goonda and hence you can be taken into custody. Not only that, you wont be able to fight a case for 90 days which can be extended upto 1 year. Icing on the cake is that Bangalore, which is the capital city of the state of Karnataka is called the IT Capital of India. With the growth of cheap smartphones in the market, almost everybody has phones which are used to listen to songs. Hearing to a bollywood song while moving in a BMTC bus which is being played loudly by a passenger’s phone is a very common thing. So everybody actually breaks copyright law, it is almost taken for granted and yet nobody seem to find it absurd to bring it under something as draconian as Goonda Act. We at FSMK along with other likeminded organizations like PUCL, ALF are planning some activities to sensitize public around this topic. Hopefuly unlike in the movie, our people will stand up against such absurd laws and force the government to revert it.

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