Epilogue

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time"
- T.S. Elliott

It's been over a week since I've arrived from India and I still feel different.

What did I experience in India that I have trouble letting go of now?

Maybe Louis and I have become more spiritual, serious people.









Maybe not.









Maybe we are forever enraptured in the serenity of India.









Or maybe it's just the chai.





Perhaps it's just that this adventure has made us more strong and fearless than we ever were before.









On second thought...





In any case, it's been an incredible experience and I'm sad to see it end. But I look forward to the start of a new adventure tomorrow. And then the day after that. And then the day after that...

http://robohit.blogspot.com/

Thanks for reading. Goodnight everyone.

Closing Time

After a delayed flight and a foggy taxi ride, my parents and I arrived in Meerut City around dinnertime on Dec 18. We spent the next five days there, and if you think that the religious ceremonies were over at the wedding, then guess again. First comes more listening to Sanskrit preachings...









...a wedding reception...













...kite-flying with my new sis-in-law (bhabi, for all you Hindi-speakin readers)...









..and streetside food (chaat) with my Dad.





At 1:30am on Dec 24, I flew from Delhi to Amsterdam, where my parents and I had to sit through a 8 hour stopover. Okay, no, we didn't sit through it, we left the airport and saw the city...





Once a Metro reader, always a Metro reader...









And I'd love to tell you about our early morning Amsterdam trip, but somewhere on the staircase of the Anne Frank house my camera batteries died, and so I switched to a film camera for the rest of the shots. So I guess you'll just have to find me in person for those :)





I arrived back in Canada on the evening of Christmas Eve.

Happy New Year!

Blogging makes expressing your thoughts to a large audience easy. Being able to publish your thoughts easily means lots of people will do it. Lots of people publishing their ideas freely means we get a lot of different perspectives available to us. I think that's pretty cool.

Great to hear you're doin alright, Haran. And it's pretty cool that you're keepin us directly updated on what's going on.

***

Moving on, as I'm writing this it's the evening of January 2, so that means there's one more day til I'm back to Waterloo to start my next term at school. I still miss Hyderabad like anything, but I'm looking forward to heading back to Waterloo too.

After posting the rest of my India pictures and wrapping up this blog, of course :)

Flash back to the evening of Dec 14, 2004. The HK movie star is on his way to Amsterdam. And his manager is back at Secunderabad train station.





On Dec 14, my family from North India took a train down to Hyderabad to attend my cousin's wedding. There's the train...





...there's my family...





...and there's two people who flew all the way from Canada for my cousin's wedding. Nice to see you too, Mom and Dad.





My relatives were coming off a 30 hr train ride, so after heading to the hotel...









...catching up a bit...





...and grabbing the groom (centre, my cousin brother Ashish) for a last picture before he lost his bachelorhood...





..everybody called it a night. The next day, there were a few small ceremonies, last-minute shopping, and then the wedding started in the evening.

If you've never been, Indian weddings are a really elaborate affair. It starts off with horse riding and lots of dancing...









...and then photo sessions, before the ceremony starts.













I won't go into details explaining all of the ceremony, probably because it's in Sanskrit and I have no clue what most of it means. So we'll let the pictures speak for themselves.









































The wedding started at 7pm on Dec 15th, and the last photo was taken at around 4am Dec 16th. I actually woke up at 6am the next day to go to work, but I don't really remember most of it :).





My co-op term with TCS finished on Dec 17. On Dec 18, I said goodbye to Hyderabad and left for New Delhi.

After an eight-hour flight delay.





But hey, at least I had company :)

Seriously scary stuff

Were this to happen just a couple of weeks ago, my reaction would probably be different.

Haran, I heard SL is hit pretty bad. If you're reading this, write us back right away to say everything's okay.

Kartik, Ahmed: hope everything is okay with your friends & family in Chennai.

My prayers go out to everyone in the area.

Lu's Last Day

It's hard to believe it's all over.

It's hard to settle back into a routine. It's hard to believe how quiet this part of the world feels.

But it's not hard to believe that there's still a ton of pictures I haven't posted up yet. So I'm gonna shelf the depression for now and get right back to where I left off.

So after our last weekend of partying with the HK movie star, he took off for a tour of North India with Ahmed. It's a pretty cool story, you can read about it here.

But the few days before Lu left, there was still last-minute admin stuff left to do. Like leave at 7am to get train tickets from Secunderabad.





The people in that line ahead of us were all pretty tired too. Luckily you can always find people selling idli sambhar on the street.





Eventually he got his train tickets, and we headed to work on Friday for his last day at TCS. The day started out pretty normal with a coffee break at the balcony...





(The dude above, btw, is the CM for our floor)






But at lunchtime, we got adenturous and decided to walk down the street from TCS and explore "Shilparamum", the arts and crafts village buried behind some high gates and forestry.






The security guard at the gate was having his lunch when we approached, so the conversation went something like this (in Hindi):

Guard: Wait! (Chomp, slurp) You can't go through here, the entrance is on the other side of the street. And there's a fee.

Ro: C'mon, but our lunch break is only so long and we don't have time. We'll be quick. Just let us go explore around here for a bit.

Guard: Mmmpf, slurp...

Us: We'll take that as a yes.

I can't believe we didn't find this place before. Heaven on earth. Something like what we'd imagine the Kerela backwaters to be.





I guess it's called an arts and crafts village because there's small huts that sell arts and crafts, but most of it them were closed for lunch.





Picasa's Hello seems to be rejecting some of our nicer pictures, but it's still tough to capture the serenity of this place on film. So we'll just have to talk about this in person.





What can I say. Working in an Indian office has been a pretty cool experience, because it's all the modern facilities inside with incredible beauty like Shilparamum on the outside. We'll miss ya, TCS.

Finished Friday with a solemn, formal dinner at Angheeti.





Well, as formal as either of us can get :)





I think we rented National Treasure from Fribzi that night.




It was an awful movie, and I didn't expect the rest of the term to be much of an improvement. Luckily, I was very wrong...

Hello, Toronto

Last pictures from our term at TCS. Wedding in Secunderabad. Reception in Meerut. Stopover in Amsterdam...

Man there's a lot to catch up on! Sorry it's been a while. Stay tuned...

Happy Holidays!

I'll be back to TO on Christmas Day, and til then getting on the internet looks like it'll be tough....

So til next time, Happy Holidays everybody! Take care.

Still alive!

Close to Delhi right now. This internet cafe is awful. I miss Hyderabad. TCS term is over! More soon :)

Diversion

I saw this link up on Scott's blog and had to get it up. I guess it only had to be a matter of time before this sort of thing started up :)

Sorry for the long delay in writing, real update to follow soon! Well, as soon as this term gets a bit under control.

TGIF

What are you doing here?

Go check out Lu's blog. We'll talk next week.