Dream Diary Vrooom Vrooom Edition

First of all it sucks that Blogger is the only service from Google that demands a sign in every single time you go to the page. 

Now then, just had an awesome dream! 

I am in high school, stuck in some bizarre he-said she-said situation between my teacher, a girl, my mother and me. My mom and my teacher are having an argument, over me making videos on school property. Their disagreement is over some point about rules and policy, and has little to do with me. I apologise separately both to my mom and my teacher, and to the girl as well. Teacher just tells me, I did not know you were shooting videos! You should continue to do it, then argues with my mom again about shooting videos on school property without informing other students or taking permission. 

I bunk class being disillusioned with everything, and go to the ground, where I have a smuggled quarter of white rum mixed in seven up. (This reminds me in BMM where we used to do this regularly. Once during a trip to Silvasa, teacher thought I had a mixed disguised drink and asked to taste it. I gave it to him, he found nothing mixed, and chugged quite a bit. He later caught me drinking cough syrup, then told me "you are drinking it or is it drinking you?"). Anyway, so I am in this field, and people are playing, and I seek out my friend, who suggests I go drinking. I tell him but all the bars are closed because of the pandemic, and he gives me directions to one that is open. 

I bunk the remaining classes, worried about failing the course and affecting my perfect score, and having to go through the final three years of high school without my friends, and with the irritating juniors. I'm contemplating all this while following my friend's directions and heading to the bar.  

I already had a quarter and I am dreading having more and making all these calculations about how many I should order and in what quantities, while I navigate around an empty shopping centre, its the Amrapali arcade, till I come across a tiny wine shop/bar sandwiched between a medical shop and general store. 

It is the kind of bar found in Karnataka. There is a big line outside, and the crowd is tightly packed. I navigate through the people and find that there are tables inside. Go in, and we were all tightly packed in together, with all the seats filled up, shoulder to shoulder. It's like US soldiers in a helicopter, and we are going in a war against alcohol. 

One guy comes in and makes the seating arrangements. I am made to sit between two people. There are two man seats where three people are sitting, with a table in between them. I am in the last row with the urinal to my left, then a person sitting on a bench. There are two rows of benches on the side where people are sitting without a table in between. Their drinks are being served on plastic chairs or tools. One guy, is sitting in the middle of the two rows on a plastic stool. 

Someone comments, "this is nothing, it is going to get even more crowded". I look to the left and the right. I inform the guy to my right that I smoke. That guy looks dazed already, and he says "arre yaar" or "oh no". I look to the guy sitting to his right and see him holding a cigarette, and tell the guy sitting next to me that, "why don't you swap with the next guy, we are both smokers". He is basically too lazy to move, and just one of those guys who likes to complain. He looks at me for a long time, considering it, decides not to swap, and says, "just give me 2-3 puffs, the very ends of the cigarettes". I say okay. 

One of the guys sitting across me is like one of the gunda types. He is sitting with only one other person on his bench. He is staring at me with bloodshot eyes, head tilted to the side, observing and contemplating. When he catches my eye, he tells me in particular, "why are you sitting like this, go inside, there are more benches and tables." I respond with a "It's fine, I am comfortable here." 

I look around, they have started serving the drinks. No one is coming to get my order. I am apprehensive if the bar has white rum. There is cheering, and everyone is generally talkative and happy. They turn on the TV, which starts playing low budget local hip hop productions (I am very sure there will eventually be a tv channel for this). I comment to nobody in particular, just enjoying the crowd, "I haven't been to something so crowded before the pandemic." I then remove my mask, bravely. 

A seat is placed in front of me, and a plastic stool behind that, where another guy sits. The guy who said its going to get even more crowded is right. The staff is adding benches and tables, which is also getting filled in in another room, behind the general goods store to the right, of us, as well as to the right of the urinal. 

Finally, the waiter comes in with the orders. He is holding a glass of hard drinks, a thumbs up, a strong beer and some other things. The strong beer gets taken away from his hand by someone and he yells out "aye" at him, but shakes his head as he is probably accustomed to that behavior. He then plonks the hard drink down, but before he can add the ice and thumbs up, the guy to my right straight up downs it. The waiter is flabbergasted and says, "arre yaar, at least eat some chakna now, it is early in the morning, start with some prasad" and he shows the complementary sheera and farsan. I am amused and I go cheers to the guy, which makes a bunch of people around us laugh, because we are saying cheers after drinking, or rather drinking before saying cheers like true alcoholics. The guy again thinks for a while, then says cheers. 

It's a jovial mood. There is some song playing on the tv, where a girl has a speedometer on her back. Someone from the neighboring table asks if there is a girl with a speedometer on her back. Someone else says yes. The guy who spoke first asks, "why?". At this point, me and the guy sitting on the stool opposite to me catch each others eyes, we are thinking the same thing at the same time. We both go, loudly, "vroom vroom", then laugh and give each other a high five. While high fiving, he has his middle finger folded over to give in extra punch. 

I take a panorama on my smartphone. I tell everyone to smile when the camera points at them. People ask me to send it to them, and I add everyone to a WhatsApp group called "right now". I send it to them all. While using the smartphones, I can see the phone numbers as well, they all start with a +91. Everyone is pleased with the panorama. My drink comes in. I drink it and wake up. 

View Blore

Randomly went on top of a hill. This is Bangalore. Sun on right. Moon on left.

Random terrace

Terraces are cool

Janglesh Panorama

Sanjay Gandhi National Park

Trek to Sandhan Valley

Notice the peeler next to the sleeping bag. That is a lesson learned from a previous expedition. Was going with a veteran trekkers, and experienced photography and trekking group.

The train to Igatpuri was crowded. Getting there was an adventure in itself. The traffic police made me get down from a regular rickshaw and get into a sharing (scam) one, because only those guys ply on the route between Kurla station and Lokmanya Tilak Terminus.

The safest place to stash your footwear.

And babbys. The kid was only pretending to sleep.

Igatpuri Station. We had some tasty cucumbers with masala to chill down.

The plan was to head out to the base on that night itself, but there were some problems with timings so we had to improvise.
Also check out this video

Which was awesome, no loss. And finally we reached the camping shelf. There was a little water running beside us, we fashioned a tap from a leaf, and spent the night on a shelf. 

Took a timelapse too, and the pros did some light painting.

Panorama of my Grand Aunt's house

Panorama from Taramati

From this spot, it is 180 degrees forest with view of SGNP and Tulsi Lake, and 180 degrees city

rainbow

we saw the end

Some Panoramas

Most of these panoramas were taken at Lohgad, one was taken at Vangani, on the way to Chanderi, and two were taken on the way to Peth Fort. Tried to stitch them up on a bunch of panorama makers, every single one of them performed crappily. The famed PT and PTGUI commercial edition (got it off a torrent) failed miserably, leaving a hell lot of artefacts. The fault, I presumed, was mostly accounted by the software having to match up just grass and clouds, with little else to go on. I settled to stitch them up individually on photoshop - which is what some of these are. If the white balance was not kept at a constant when the photo was taken, then it is necessary to slide the brightness bar a little towards either way in photoshop before the photos flow into one another. It was hard work. Then along comes Rossi from my office, and shows me a feature in CS3. Go to file>automate>photomerge, select the photos and you are done! It works wonderfully, correcting even brightness and contrast errors better than doing it manually. Some of these panoramas are proper 360 degree cylinderical panoramas - they have been made into the circular panoramas. The circular panoramas were made by stretching out the panoramas to a square, inverting them, using the polar co-ordinates filter in photoshop, and getting rid of the line where they match up. Use the rectangular to polar setting if you wanna try it. They are called 'planets', these are not great, but are my first attempt.

Karnala.

It was the only school picnic I had missed. Didn't feel too much at a loss back then because by all accounts, all that happened was a bit of dance and a visit to a biogas plant. The only birds they saw outside the cages were the sparrows. They had gotten terribly excited over monkeys and crabs, but that was understandable in a jungle where the only wildlife was stray dogs, crows, and humans.
Things changed today. Going with a bunch of photographers you meet online makes the whole thing look better. Anyway, they called it a trek and well, it was something I had missed long ago, so I thought I would give it a shot. Four thirty in the morning, I was awakened by a call, one of the guys in the trek was just confirming my presence. I rushed to Dadar station without thinking too much, and still, very much, asleep. The bus ride to Panvel after that woke me up enough to get to know everyone.
Eight of us. So it was a walk of about an hour and a half. If you end up at Panvel bus depot, and want to end up at Karnala fort, for heaven's sake, clarify with the driver of the tum-tum or the tuk-tuk or the gavti auto... whatever you might called the three wheeled Indian limo, that you want to head to the Karnala bird sanctuary, and not Karnala sports club, where you can apparently catch cricket matches over the weekends. This was a mistake we did, but we caught an ST to Alibaug, and dropped off at Karnala's gate. Pay the gatekeeper twenty bucks for your ticket, hide your video cam, just in case, and shell out an extra buck for a map. Today he had only one, and I got that one. It has a very wrong map, and a list of birds you will not see on the way up, and probably haven't heard about if you are not an ornithologist. Finding out which of the rampant and wild tracks within the sanctuary are actually represented on the map is a challenging thing to do. Infact, the map on the board before the second gate has an entire track missing from the map they give at the first gate.
Basically head upwards, any which way you want, and unless you hit upon the very very steep short cut (the map does not use the word "very" even once), you will probably end up at Karnala fort in an hour and a half or so. Up there, we met a bunch of hikers, exchanged a few stories of climbing and such, and he told us that this was like an introductory trek for those who want to get into that sort of a thing.
I definitely remembered my lungs screaming for oxygen on the way up. This was nothing compared to the things they had done. There were one or two sections where people gave up completely. The first point was a small temple, with a broken top... things got much steeper after that. The second stop was the actual pinnacle, people didn't usually venture beyond that. And you can't, it just goes upwards, and the only way to climb it is to use at least four people and ropes, and a tree on the umm... left side as you walk towards the pinnacle. Its this creeper on the sides of the pinnacle, and that's all you have to clutch on to. Of course, if it rains in the season you try to do this, the rocks will be too damn slippery, and you will reach a heaven beyond the one you just trekked into.
The bunch of trekkers there finally clarified the difference between hiking, trekking, and climbing. Trekking involves walking long distances to places that haven't had roads constructed to them as yet. Hiking is walking or travelling free, or at least dirt cheap, from one point to another, by any and all means possible. Climbing, is well, going up something steep.
These people had gone to glaciers and could recall particular holes in different mountains where you could shove in your climbing rope. I do not know their terminology, nor could totally understand their enthusiasm, but they seemed like a bunch of really happy people. They had endless praise for one another, and the praise was received with endless modesty. They left on the note that we would meet again in "some such place".
Noon was yet to hit. These guys did things early. I know friends who wake up at noon and wander about aimlessly till evening. Infact, I was like that some time ago.
Anyway, it is interesting to see photographers in action. Just before they click, their eyes dart around the frame checking for things that would make the thing look bad. Their legs and shoulders are hunched almost like they would hungrily pounce on some food. They behave exactly like hunters in a sense, only they use cameras.
We relaxed with a steady wind, and the sky drifted some clouds towards us every now and then. Everything would become foggy and the trees and the turrets of the forts would gradually get consumed by the vapor, and then revealed again suddenly, in a matter of minutes. From our vantage point, we could even see the receding clouds. It wasn't rain, the rain was below us. I was scared of lightning, but did not voice any opinions about this.
You know those pictures or movies where the clouds are slowly rolling over the mountains, pushed by the wind. Yeah, only the mountain, was below our feet. So the winds were pushing the clouds over the mountains, below our feet. Our feet may have been on the ground, but it wasn't too difficult to imagine that we were walking on the clouds. We sat in the clouds, ate in the clouds, photographed each other in the clouds, and even smoked in the clouds. There might be rainfall somewhere that smells like cloves.
The coming down bit was easier than we imagined, but we got slightly waylaid and hit everything from slabs of crystal to condoms. There is a lot of insect life, the leaves beneath your feet are in different stages of decay in this season, so there is a nice tonal range from dark brown to bright yellow... which looks like gold leaves.
Had tea at the bottom, figured out that you could book bungalows for four hundred bucks for a weekend, and then bussed back home dead tired and dirty.
End of story I think, here are the pics.