Category: India

Daily Routine.

A fellow blogger and  well-wisher,  Jean mailed me to ask if all was well with me as I had not been writing blog posts since early October. I had responded with:

“I am hale and hearty and enjoying being a couch potato.

I have not come up with anything to write about recently. I read your posts every day.

Thank you for asking.

Regards.”

Since then I had seriously been considering coming up with some ideas every now and then to blog more regularly and a golden opportunity presented itself with two running holidays for our newspapers following our five day long Deepavali festival.

As my readers know, my morning routine includes reading five newspapers and solving seven crossword puzzles. I was totally lost during the two days when the newspapers did not arrive and was quite frustrated trying to occupy myself with something else. It is a wonder that I survived.

The delivery of daily newspapers recommenced this morning and I am back on even keel. So much so that I indulged myself with a pedicure/foot massage and a hair cut/beard trim/ head massage as I was lucky to find a noon slot with the pedicurist.

I am feeling great with that indulgence and will now give serious thought to finding things to write about more often.

Peeves!

This series of posts has been inspired by Nick who suggested that I list my peeves. He calls his, “Petty Peeves” but, I prefer to call mine just peeves. Since my peeves will need explanations unlike Nick’s one-liners, I will use more than one post to list them all.

Let me start with my morning peeves. The first things that upset me are these:
My morning pastime of sitting out in the veranda with my mug of tea, gets spoiled by various thoughtless people.
1. Talking loudly on cell phones just outside my garden sitting atop a two wheeler with its engine running ranks the topmost.
2. Impatient sounding of horn to get a traffic jam cleared because some idiots do not know how to part or are in the process of offloading passengers near a restaurant near my home.
3. Noisy vehicles of all kinds with deliberately made so or defective silencers.
4. Vehicles with extremely loud music being played leading me to wonder if the driver and passengers want to listen to music or want to show off to people outside.
5. Cars with barking dogs with their necks outside the windows leading other dogs being walked to bark too leading to total cacophony.

The next are once I am inside and see folded newspaper pages to highlight advertisements like the following.

Reading the half page as shown in the first image, turning it and then folding it to read the rest of the paper is very annoying.

The stretched out piece of one page to encourage the reader to go to the page to open it to read advertisements, at least in my case, has exactly the opposite effect. I swear to myself not ever to buy the product or patronise the institution advertised.

Full page advertisements of ugly looking politicians selling their candidacy or constitution for whatever reason is another no no for me. Here too, that politico will never get my vote.

Next peeves will be unsolicited phone calls either selling something or scammers who must think that I am a moron.

Closely followed by those are SMS messages and WhatsApp messages of commercial nature which annoy more than create interest.

More to follow.

Invasion!

Among the many things that I enjoy in the mornings when I sit with my mug of tea in our veranda, the sound of the koel calling inevitable brings back memories of an old Hindi song.

Two pairs of Bulbuls have nested in our home. One in the hedge bordering our garden and one on top of a window in our kitchen. You can see the latter below.
The one below is a google image of a nest with an egg, very similar to the one in our garden hedge.
I have been witness to the shenanigans of a pair of Koels who have hijacked the nest in the garden to dump koel eggs in it as they do either in these or crow’s nests. The hapless Bulbuls keep trying to chase the koels away with little success as the latter are much bigger and simply ignore the former.

Fascinating sight of one of nature’s phenomena. I have only heard / read about koels dumping their eggs in the nests of other birds as they do not build nests of their own, and this morning ballet is simply too interesting to ignore. It takes the allure of my morning dose of news papers to drag me away.

Flood Alert.

Monsoon should have withdrawn normally last week after our Anantha Chaturdasi.

My regular readers will remember my writing two years ago about our local river being in spate. You can re-read it here.. Due to my current health issues, I have not ventured out to see the river as I normally do every year but, have been receiving news about it being in spate from others.

Yesterday’s local newspapers came out with flood alerts in all the rivers running through Pune.

Today, I have been receiving videos of some parts of the city under flood water and here is one of them.


I will keep my readers posted of further developments.

Frustration!

A friend  sent me some goodies earlier today using a local delivery service.

First, she rang me up to warn me to expect the parcel and then I got a text message from the delivery partner as he is called over here, advising me that he would be reaching me within 22 minutes. I wondered how he could have calculated that timing since he wouldn’t know the traffic conditions when he started but, let it pass.

Thirty five minutes later, I got a call from him asking me for directions. He was just 200 Mts away from my home and I gave him directions and landmarks to follow.

It took another fifteen minutes and three more telephone calls for that smart fellow to finally reach me.

When I asked him why there was confusion, he pointed his smartphone to me and said that the google location kept showing him wrong directions.  The same app had given me the driving time at the time of starting his journey!

Like me, don’t you wonder, why these applications are called smart when all that was needed for that gent was to follow the directions that I, obviously smarter than the app, had given him?

Smart Phone Camera.

This was at 6.30 AM this morning when I was sitting in our verandah with my morning mug of tea. The sight of the full moon was spectacular and I tried to catch it with the camera in my phone and this was the best result among four other shots.

It looked more like this shot from google images.
I really wished that I had kept my old digital camera which would have given a much better image than what I got with the phone camera.  I should investigate and purchase one if it is not too expensive.