A trek to Fort St. Eynard

Yesterday, me and my friends went for a trek to Fort St. Eynard. I have been there in the winter when the mountain track was covered with snow and the trees and plants were devoid of leaves except for the coniferous ones . The trek is approximately 3 kms and takes close to one and half hours. This time the whole path was completely different. The trees had leaves and occasionally we could hear the birds chirping. The weather was sunny and pleasent. We started off at approximately quarter past nine. It took us close to one hour forty five minutes to reach the fort. This time the fort was open. It is closed in the winter hence the last time I went, I had to satisfy myself with a view of the closed door only. But walking on the snow was both fun and more dangerous. We had to hire raquettes to be able to walk on the foot high snow. In the winter it feels like walking on a white sheet of imense expanse. After we reached the fort we continued along the track and reached a small village. Along the way we enjoyed the view from the top of a sheer cliff. I have vertigo, so it was little scary for me but anyway it was a nice feeling. After walking for a while we sat down and had our lunch with pain au chocalat, juice, chips, fruits and croissant. It was a little picnic and off course a nice one on the edge of a sheer cliff. On the way we met few trekkers which was completely absent in the winter. The fact is that the trekking route is closed in the winter but when we went to tourism office to enquire about it they could not give us any information. Anyway the absence of information was boon in disguise. Near the village in the winter the mountain slopes become a paradise for skiers. Generally the trekking routes are marked. But sometimes the marks are put on a stone in the ground. So when we went in the winter we were kind of lost in the snow and finally landed up on the skiing slope where I guess walking must be prohibited. Anyway, the funny thing was that while crossing over to the skiing slope from the forrest my raquette got caught on the trip wire of one of the telepheriques meant for carrying the skiers up the slope. And the consequence the skiers were stranded for ten minutes without power. Well that was in the winter. Once we reached the village, we trekked for four kilometer to Cole de Vence along D512 where we had parked our car. Last time we took the bus back from the village to Grenoble since it was already dark and we did not have our vehicle like this time. Walking on this track both in deep winter and summer I have seen the two faces of the same place. I could not imagine the place which had nothing but snow all around could play host to a variety of flowers in the summer.

Latecomers on time

To begin with this piece I am writing just to document that something of this type has happened on planet earth. Few days back an interesting thing happened. Here in Grenoble I have few friends who call themselves the company. I don't know why. But one thing is quite interesting about this company. They are never on time except for when they have to catch a train or bus. In that too one of them has a distinction of missing a flight. Well thats for another time. So I invited the company and some other friends for a small get together. The official time mentioned 7:30 in the evening. As usual I assumed the party won't start before 8:30. Accoridngly I prepared my stuff for the dinner. But then at 7:15 there is ring on the door. Wow! so early who are these people. I opened the gate and there they were the holy trinity called the company. I did not believe my eyes first. But they were there. I checked the batteries of my clocks to see if I am seeing the correct time. I even called the cell number one of the guys to check if it rings then and there itself. It did. I could not belive myself that they are on time and more precisley before time. Now its almost a week that event has happened but still its a mystery to me why it happened. May be someday they will tell me.

Flying away

I fly like a bird,
Over the mountains,
Covered with white snow,
Not knowing where to go,
The sun shines on my face,
The blue sky opening its arms
Greets me with a smile
And I flew for many a mile.

I fly like a bird,
Spreading my wings,
Peering from above,
One the vast expanse of water,
Blue and black it glitters,
Like a large shiny stone,
The clouds holding me high
And I have to fear nothing nigh.

I fly like a bird,
Singing my own song,
Over the dense green forest,
Looking like an emerald,
I flew a long distance,
Till my wings flapped,
And when I finally stopped,
I thought of the unseen I saw,
I simply clapped.

In Search of the Castaways or The Children of Captain Grant by Jules Verne

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Music comes to life

Here I would like to document my first experience with live western classical music concert. Many times I have heard classical music on my computer and even seen recordings of those but the real thing is no much for those recordings. It was a concert organized by the Grenoble municipality I guess, for it was free. It is true I don't understand head and tale of any music but still the experience was worth putting in the form of few words. The motivation for going to this particular concert was twofold, first it was free second a colleague of my friend was playing the clarinet in the group. So me and my friends arrived at Grenoble theater at 8:15 in the evening. Took our seats in the last rows of the balcony. The show was to start at 8:30 and it did start at 8:30 a thing unthinkable back home. Well I think the west also has its share in late start ups but I am yet to come across one. I don't know what exactly it was a symphony or something else but there was a rhythm to follow. I guess through the music some story was being told and the twists and turns of the story was clearly audible. The concert was called l’Harmonie de Grenoble. It had two performances " Les tortueux méandres de la pensée" by Karim Maurice and Symphonie No. 3 "Planet Earth" by Johan de Meij. Both the performances were excellent as far as I am concerned. The minor details as to the strong and weak points of the composition can be debated only by experts in this field. I felt like being associated with the music which is missing when you listen to a piece on a computer or a music player. You feel charged up when the tune is playing a part of the story full of thrills, you feel the sorrow when it event are sad and so on. Its no different from watching the story on a silver screen.

A trip to French country side

The last Saturday (06/12) I decided to go trekking in the French country side. It is now a month that I am trying to earn a living in this beautiful city of Grenoble on the foothills of Alps. Its little cold around this time of the year but that did not deter me from my plans. It had two benefits from my point of view, first, I get to see the French country side and second, I get to lose a few pounds which I have a little too many. So the target was to reach the old French fort Bastille on the top of a mountain from there climb for another kilometer to Le Mémorial National des Troupes de Montagne and from there downhill all the way to St. Martin Vinoux around 6kms from the memorial. The road takes you through some relatively steep descent and then you enter the French counrty side covered with lush green grass even in this winter. Away from the madding crowds of the city, where every sound is either of a car or another vehicle, the surrounding is filled with silence. A silence broken only by the barking of guard dogs. Well, I will come to that subject later. The city of Grenoble is located around the summit of the Drac and the Isere. In the city you can't hear the sound of the river, partly because of the sound pollution and partly due to the dam ahead which controls the flow. But in the country side there is nothing to stop the river from flowing from one rock to other and the music of the flowing river is remarkable on the background of total silence. So coming back to the trek, the first few kilometers were event free and then when I entered one of the villages where houses are guraded by dogs I really got nasty welcome from the four footed devils. They probably can't get out of the fenced compound but their every action will let you know they want to do so and bite you to pieces. One house in particular was more scary in the sense that it had six hunting dogs guarding it. Anyway very soon I learnt to ignore them, but people with feeble heart should be careful. The mountain tracks here are differnet from the ones in India in the sense that there are less people and no mules. Eventually after trekking for almost one and half hours I reached my destination. Frankly speaking its a bus stop on route #3 but anyway the trek through the mountain was fulfilling.

Wine, snow and the strike

It is now three weeks that I am on French soil. Thousands of miles far from my home I am trying to make life from scratch. Hostel hopping had been my moto all these years. But now I have to go looking for mundane stuff like appartment, grocery etc etc. Well thats part of life I have come to believe. I started my stay with a bottle of French wine, though it is widely believed that original French wines are no more and all the good Frnech wines trace their ancestery to Californian wines. Well its a different story, what I meant to say is, come to France and wine or `vin' in local dialect should be your starting point. For the last few weeks I have tasted quite a few wines mostly the very moderately priced ones. Only problem here, on the street very few people will understand anything other than French. Well so far so good, then came the snow. That is not so good for me. Though it seems quite exciting to stay in a area covered with snow but the accompanying cold and wet weather is sometimes extremely irritating. Especially when you have to travel to your lab or go to the shop to grab your grocery. I have yet to face the heavy snow nut the slight snow that I faced has sent shivers down my spine. The last thing new for me here is a French strike. I say a French strike because in India where I come from a strike means to cripple everything. If in the process a few people end up dead then it is a very successful strike. But here strikes are completely different. Say for instance the workers of the canteen where I have lunch daily were on strike on day. It is not that they did not prepare food, they did what was required of them, but outside the canteen they set up another stall serving sandwiches, coke and water free of cost to all those who support their demand and do not have food in the canteen. It was amazing to see how eagerly people were supporting their cause. There was also option of giving some voluntary donation for the food being served. Things like this may sound completely amazing or astonishing but then different people different culture.

Delhi Metro

Well this is a new phenomena may be 5-6 years old. The concept of mass transit system though existent in Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) in a small way has now caught up in National Capital Region. The days are gone when you would see sights of people hanging from the doors of a blue line bus to get to their office or back to their homes. The history of Delhi Metro can be read on wikipedia. So, no point in writing about it. What I am going to write is about the mass of humanity it serves each day and the varying flavors one can see while you are in transit. I had to visit Delhi recently and I used this new phenomenon quite often for my transit purposes. Even while traveling alone, just looking at the people around you can be a very exciting experience, though it can earn a few scornful look when you give a little longer than cursory glance towards the female of human species (beautiful or not is debatable). Looking around you, it is quite easy to separate out the first timers like me from the seasoned riders. Take for instance first timers like me will be holding on to something to balance themselves when the train accelerates or decelerates close to a station but the seasoned once will stand without any support and on top of it will conveniently read a novel or send long sms to their friends without even blinking an eyelid. On the reading habits there is a distinction, one can spot a few riders intently reading something. If it’s a male the most probable thing would be a newspaper with the sports or economy section in front of his face and if it’s a female it can be anything from a Jeffery Archer to a MBA coaching institute practice paper. Then there are the loud band wallahs with their loud clothes and high decibel mobile phones on which the latest hits would be there for everyone to listen absolutely free of cost. Only catch, the band wallah gets to pick the song you are just an odd listener. Another hot activity is talking on the mobile with the hands free plugged into the ear and the hands busy sending sms. The most astonishing part of the metro is the absence of red blotches that one would invariably see on the corners of all government and semi-government buildings. Yes, the pan masala gang is missing. Though eating or drinking is prohibited in all facilities of Delhi metro but sometimes you can find some occasional homo sapiens huffing and puffing in with an odd fruit in hand. Out of couple of instance I came across people eating on the train one instance was quite funny. There was this lady who boarded the overcrowded train with an apple in her hand. Once settled she took her first bite and at the very same moment the public address system started its monotonic announcement that eating and drinking inside any metro premises is prohibited. Well she might have been deaf, since she continued with her endeavor. On a more serious note, one can see the father eager to get back home or the mother worrying about her kids back home or the odd couples sharing brief moments of intimacy and the list goes on. You can also spot the odd beings vacating their seats for the elderly or the rude vehemently occupying his ladies only seat even though a few ladies are standing around. Then there are those able bodied ones who evict another being from a seat saying the seat is reserved for handicapped people just because the other probably can’t read the signs pasted there. Another notable thing about the metro is its cleanliness, clearly telling the world if there is a will even in India things can work the way they should. This metro is just the beginning. A lot more cities in this country will benefit from such transit systems specially places like Kanpur where four people are stuffed like cattle in a space just big enough for three people.

Off on a Comet! a Journey through Planetary Space by Jules Verne

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The Underground City, or, The Child of the Cavern by Jules Verne

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The Master of the World - Jules Verne

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Gfsartemisia Fonts for Latex

Robur the Conqueror - Jules Verne

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Gfsartemisia Fonts for Latex

Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon - Jules Verne

Another book for the Jules Verne fan........

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Michael Strogoff - Jules Verne

Well for the past couple of years I was looking for this book. Finally thanks to Project Gutenberg I got a eBook. It was in html and the link to the Gutenberg version is given below. Being in India this book is pretty costly by my standards. So I went about converting this one into printable pdf file and finally the book is ready. Here I would like to share this one with other bookworms like me who can't afford it.

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Anyway I will add more books as and when I convert and may be add some reviews when I finish reading.

Back Home

Very soon I will be going on my vacation. But this year it is different. I will be going to West bengal, my home state. Though I was just born there but still that small itch to say that part of the country home is there. Categorically speaking I am homeless. Spent my childhood in UP where I came after spending years in Bangalore and Delhi. When in school father used to take us home on a long vacation in the summers, but then it was just another day in my life nothing special. Things changed when I went to college and I developed the habit of reading or started seeing the world outside the cocoon I grew up while living with my parents. I felt though I have spent the most of my life outside that state but my home is there. I am alien in this place, though well accepted in the folds of this society but somewhere deep inside a sense of alienation was there. Initially I used to tell my father lets go and settle in Calcutta(now Kolkata), he used to say no I will live where my father used to live thats Barddhaman. Now I understand why is it so. I am just a bong who spent his childhood in UP and spent the summers in West Bengal. But my father was born and brought up in Barddhaman. All his childhood memories has its association to that place. Left home at 17 he made a life for himself and after 33 long years he went back to that very place where he had his tryst with sand and soil. Today I am trying to get somewhere out of this country to earn my livelihood or rather I am forced to. Well why that would be another story. But the fear that torments me is where it is that I would call home. I left home when I was 17 to pursue what you call higher studies. Eleven years down the lane and I already feel tired, longing to spread my legs on a veranda sipping coconut water or strolling down the cheap book stores of Kolkata looking for a bargain or eagerly waiting for the moglai paratha on a road side stall. For the first time in my life I feel like I want to go home.

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Hanri...............

Pick and Choose

Long ago I was a hard working PhD student but now days I have become a de facto PhD student. With my work complete I have nothing else to do except for writing, whether its thesis or paper or such wishful thinking of mine as this one. But I learnt few beautiful things while doing this PhD. To start with I came to know what not to be done with a PhD student or a PhD program though the fact remains I am yet to learn what to be done for a PhD. It is quite interesting to note that though in few months or years I will be called Dr. so and so but I am yet to realize what exactly needs to be done to finish a PhD. Once I was told by my friend and senior that for a PhD you need to find a supervisor who would give you a definite time frame, like he says “I will in all likeliness would give your PhD in five years” and you may do something absolutely rubbish but as long as your supervisor says you are making progress you should be cheerful. Well I am not fully convinced with these, because in this case, time in absoluteness has no meaning unless starting point is defined and unlike many other things progress is a vector quantity. What if the supervisor says you are making progress but doesn’t define the direction? So all the time you had been cheerful about your progress when in reality you should have been worried and raising your blood pressure. It may seem to some that increasing blood pressure is not a good way to live, but believe me it’s the best way to get your PhD. Let me explain, with increasing blood pressure you would become more irritated and then a point will come when you will start feeling homicidal to everything in general and that’s the time when your PhD will be set in front of you as a tranquillizer. The logic is simple, until and unless you literally die to get a thing you won’t understand the worth of it and the supervisor too won’t get the satisfaction of saving his own life. Well I have thought it as a moto, if ever one becomes a supervisor he shouldn’t give a PhD until and unless he sees his student carrying a pistol or long knife under the belt.

Well that was the first lesson. The second lesson, though you don’t need a PhD to learn it but a PhD will make you feel it first hand for a prolonged period so that it remains embedded in your system, if put in words it will sound like this, if you have power flaunt it and make everybody around you feel miserable. It doesn’t require much effort to do it. Tell everyone under you to follow certain rules and openly defy them yourself. That will give you a sense of having a say over others. Talk about ethics and morality without even bothering to see where you are standing in regards to the above two quantities. Ask everyone to be on time to a task while you take your own time. Tell them again and again that they are a useless piece of shit whose very existence depends on your whims and fancies. If something good happens its your credit and if something goes wrong find the person responsible and make him feel that he is good for nothing even though you are the one who is responsible for mess, and while making such accusations don’t even bother to see that the number of years the convict has put doing the same work which by stroke of luck has gone wrong this time. Last but not least you are always right and everybody else is only right when you have nothing to say on that matter. But I feel this is still less, the feeling of being powerful to me will come when I will make everybody under me to call a cow, a dog, and over and above they will truly believe it. So another moto, if ever one has power he should flaunt it and flaunt it to maximum.

Well that’s not the end of it, there is one more lesson I got, that is if you are in power than you are the one you get to pick and choose while others should follow your diktat. This fact I learnt from some simple events taking place around me. It is true for any place that out of all the option available to person some will be good and some bad. In most cases a person will be tempted to choose the good options if he can do so and more so if that person is paying hard cash for the end product, in this case a PhD. As a personal note I would prefer a supervisor who has excellent track record for research as most places while employing me would demand the same. So a time in a bad place will mean more time for me in a bad state. But those in power will decide otherwise. Your bad state is your responsibility even though I am responsible for it. And then they will adopt a procedure which will suit their taste. They will ask you visit some people whom you can join as a miserable fellow, then fill up a form in which you indicate your preferences as to whom you would like to join to feel the least miserable and then some hungry wolves will pour on your form as if you are some delicious piece of meat to be devoured with instant delight. In the end a decision will come out and most probably you will be sent to anybody other than your first choice. But here two lessons needs to be learnt, first if you are in power you get to pick and choose, second if you are not in power make your choices so that the powerful feel happy and you look unhappy even though you got what you wanted. But then it adds another moto, if one ever gets to pick and choose, he should pick and choose in a way so as to the effected feels miserably cheated or deliberately put to suffer, it will depend on the effected to make their choices wisely. I still wonder whether Hitler or Attila the Hun did PhDs. Well it would definitely be funny to say Dr. Attila the Hun. Anyway never mind……

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Few moments with a friend and Jacobs Creek

I promised my friend a treat on the occasion of my open seminar. Monetary consideration had forced my to postpone it again and again for last couple of months. Finally today I got for him what I promised. A bottle of Jacob's Creek 2006 Chardonnay white wine. Well a little expensive, and he got the cake and fish fry. Both of us prefer the wine chilled. The chilling plant, few kilos of ice in bucket full of chilled water. Well our party started a little late around 10:30 in the night. With the customary cheers, which I am scared of because I feel in that process I might break the glassware, our celebration started. It was a brilliant evening. The result a mild intoxication and a full stomach. A brilliant pale yellow liquid with a sweet smell should be a rough description of this particular sample. As for the taste you should drink it to feel it. The party ended with a walk and photo session by my expert photographer friend. Its a different thing that I had to get the original pic from him by showering some nice adjectives otherwise what I got was his masterly cropped and edited version. Well in the end I must say a really great day with Jacob and my photographer friend.