A Great Love Story

Recently on tele, I heard about a real life love story by which I was really moved. I wanted to share it with you guys.

Herman Rosenblat was 12 years old when he and his family were taken from their home in Poland and sent to a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Young Herman was forced to work shoveling bodies into a crematorium. All the while he did not know if he, too, would soon be killed. One day two years later, Herman walked up to the barbed wire fence and saw a girl on the other side. "The girl asked him, 'What are you doing in there?'" Herman replied. "Can you give me something to eat?" and she took an apple out of her jacket. "The girl fed Herman an apple every day for seven months. Then one day he told her not to come back — he was being moved to another camp. A tear came down her eyes and as Herman turned around and went back, he too started to cry knowing that he might not see her again. "Herman was shipped to Czechoslovakia. Just two hours before he was scheduled to die in the gas chambers there, Russian troops liberated the camp and Herman was set free.

Almost 15 years later, Herman was living and working in New York City. A friend set him up on a blind date with a woman named Roma Radzika. Herman was immediately drawn to her. When they began talking about their lives, Roma asked Herman where he was during World War II. "He said, 'In a concentration camp, and then she said, 'I came to a camp and I met a boy there and I gave him some apples and I sent them over the fence.'"And suddenly it hit Herman like a ton of bricks and he said to her, 'There was a boy? Was he tall?' And she said, 'Yes.' Herman continued, 'And one day he told you not to come around anymore because he's leaving? That boy was me. 'Roma and her family had moved from Poland to Germany, using forged papers to hide that they were Jewish. They lived on a farm next to Herman's camp, posing as Christians to avoid being captured. when Roma brought apples and bread for Herman, he used to say, "I'll see you tomorrow." Herman proposed her right then and there," Herman said, 'Look, I'll never let you go anymore. … Now that we're free we're going to be together forever.'"

Recently Herman and Roma celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Talk about fate and destiny. Boy, what a beautiful love story. People made for each other will be brought together by God.

India Wins Maiden A1GP Race

Yesterday Team India won the A1 GP feature race for the first time at the Zhuhai International Circuit in China, thanks to Narain Karthikeyan. Narain dude, you rock! Ever since he got into the team, I was sure something like this was sure to happen. Feel sorry for him though, that he couldn't get a seat in F1 for the 2008 season as the competition was really tough with lot of F1 big boys fighting it out amongst themselves. Don't worry Narain, you're time will come.

On Saturday, Narain set a good laptime to place himself third on the starting grid for Sunday's feature race. Narain took the lead from Team New Zealand after the 29th lap. Team India did a really good job, especially during the pit stops. After the second pit-stop the race got really exciting with Team New Zealand putting pressure on Team India, but Narain kept his nerve and brought home the car. Lets hope, this is just the start of something wonderful for Team India.

Movie Review: Hitman

I have to confess that the movie trailer of Hitman duped me into going for the movie. The movie is about an assassin (No. 47) whose sole purpose of living is to kill people. No. 47, played by Timothy Olyphant had a childhood in a facility where they were not given names but numbers instead. The kids were all taught to survive by killing and brought up with a coldheart. They all have a barcode tattooed on the back of their clean shaven heads which is clearly visible to everyone, I wonder how then are they not caught and go unnoticed in the public after all the crime they do? The movie takes place in Russia where No. 47 is after a target to be eliminated. After completing his task, he finds himself as the target. Ironically, our protagonist who has the habit of killing anyone who knows about him, spares the life a girl - just to add some sex scenes to the pointless movie. The movie actually leaves lot of questions unanswered. What else do you expect from a movie that is made from a video game. Talk about the new generation getting spoiled after playing these kinda crapy video games. If killing is action for you, then here is a good action movie for you. Clearly, not my cup of tea (I prefer coffee..).

The Good Ol' Days Of Sakleshpur Trekking

The long awaited Bangalore - Mangalore railway service starts today with the ceremonial train between the two cities being flagged off by the Union Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav. The services had been stopped for the last 11 years mainly due to safety reasons, now the tracks have been converted from metre -gauge to broad-gauge. These tracks run through Western Ghats, one of the most picturesque locations on earth. The reopening of the tracks will be bad news for lot of trekkers/hikers who come here every year. The 56km trekking spot runs from Sakleshpur to Subrahmanya. The tracks run some 3100 feet above the sea-level, with 60 tunnels (the longest tunnel being more than half a kilometer), more than 100 bridges and some 25 waterfalls. I myself have been to Sakleshpur for 2 fascinating treks.

May 2005:

A two day trek from Sakleshpur to Subrahmanya with a group of 15 trekkers from Tejas Networks. The trek started from Sakleshpur at around 5:30am. Direction was never a problem as we had to walk along the tracks, but long walking on the sleepers could be a real pain. We stopped at an old station called Donigal at 8:30am for breakfast. The occasional rain made us to get out our rain gear, but that didn't dampen our spirits. It was just a small price we had to pay for the beautiful scenic feasts our eyes were to be treated with. The real challenge was crossing of bridges which had wooden sleepers, some of them decayed over time and slippery due to rain. The sleepers had enough gap between them for an average person to slip down and it was hard to focus as we walked because you could see the bottom of the valley some 700 meters below. We were all cautious, and had to cross these bridges slowly and carefully. One bridge in our path was called the "Killer Bridge" (for obvious reasons), had couple of its wooden sleepers missing in the middle of the bridge, so crossing it really gave us the shivers. Crossing this bridge was a balancing act of walking one foot in front of the other over a narrow truss that runs along the side of the bridge. The second challenge were the tunnels, which were long, dark and spooky. Couple of times we were attacked by low flying bats inside the tunnel. We were glad that we had got our torches for this trip. It was exciting, not knowing which one of these challenges we were going to face next, but it kept on coming one after another. We were in attack mode. We were moving into some of the most spectacular sceneries of the Ghat section, the fog and rain made it even beautiful. After lunch we met lot of other trekking groups enroute to Yedukumeri, an old station and our final halt for the day. Yedukumeri was an old railway station and had couple of old station rooms (even though they were in ruins). The trekking group that reached Yedukumeri first got these rooms. Thanks to fast guys like me, our group got both the rooms for ourselves. We cooked food for dinner and slept in our wet sleeping bags.

Day two, we had some change in plans. We were not going to Subrahmanya as we had some injured trekkers in our group after the 12 hour continous walking (over sleepers) the previous day. Going downhill was not an option as the rivers had flooded because of continous rain. We heard from a localite that there was a village on top of the mountain range nearby and there was a transport bus from there at 1pm. So we started from Yedukumeri at 6am towards the village. After walking along the tracks for almost an hour, then we started climbing the mountain. It was steep with thick vegetation, which made it even more difficult to climb. To make matters even worse, there were leeches running all over our bodies sucking the life out of our bodies. We took nearly 3 hours to climb the mountain. Finally on top, we were struggling to catch our breathe, all that turned into gasps as we saw the breath taking view of the Ghat mountain ranges around us. After another hour of walk we reached the small village on top of the mountain. The villagers were excited to see us, some invited us to their house and gave us breakfast. The villagers were really friendly, we took pictures with them. Our group raided the only shop in the village, it was like the shopkeeper had won a lottery. The 1pm bus was the only bus to that village, we prayed for the bus to come on that day, as our fate depended on it. You should have seen our faces as the Karnataka KSRTC bus pulled up at the village. Although the bus found it tough to carry us over the hill, I was glad this old rickety bus had made it to take us back into civilization.

January 2006:

Ever since the last abandoned trip to Subrahmanya, our group wanted to make another trip to Sakleshpur as we wanted to complete the trek. The Republic day holiday seemed like the nice time to take the trip. Our group had only eight guys this time but from four different companies in Bangalore. The excitement was little less this time as we already knew our challenges and the surprise factor was missing. This time we decided to start trekking from Subrahmanya back to Sakleshpur. We reached Subrahmanya Bus Stand at 5am and walked towards the railway tracks. It tooks us couple of hours to climb a mountain and finally reach the tracks. Works on the tracks had started and we could see workers everywhere. At 9am we stopped for breakfast at a small makeshift hotel made for the track workers. We trekked though lot of tunnels and over long wooden bridges as we were again treated with more and more beauty of the Western Ghats. But this time we had another challenge, there were occasionally small engine trucks running over the rails at high speeds, carrying workers and equipments from place to place. As its a single rail track route, we had to make sure that no engine cars were coming as we crossed long bridges. The afternoon sun was unusually hot, making us even more tired. We had to stop many times enroute to recharge ourselves with some energy drinks. After long hours of walking we finally reached Yedikumeri (our half way point) at 3pm only to find that the railway workers had occupied all the station rooms, forcing us to camp on the station platform. We ate and slept after the exhausting day. At 5pm an Engine car stopped at Yedikumeri Station to drop off some workers. The Engineer on board offered to drop us at Sakleshpur and we gladly accepted it. We had shorted our trip thanks to the Engineer, moreover we had already seen the rest of the trip on our last visit. Strangely it took us 2 trips to Sakleshpur, but we finally conquered this trek.

My Doggy Boy

It was some 3 years back, my mum was the one who noticed that we had a frequent visitor to our house - a dog. He was a big dog - most probably somebody's pet, who jumped over our compound wall everyday to feast on our leftovers. We didn't shoo him away but left food for him, he slowly settled at our house. He guarded our house during the night and slumbered peacefully during the day in our car porch. Thats how he became our pet dog.

Ironically we never thought of naming him, but occasionally called him Pattichan (Patti means dog in Malayalam). He seemed to respond to anything we called him. We didn't put him in our kennel or chained him - but there was some invisible bond that kept him there. I got him a collar so that when he went outside, people won't throw stones at him thinking he is a stray. He is an intelligent dog, most of time playful and always wanting me to rub his reddish-brown coat. The bond grew from there. Whenever I went out to have food from a restaurant, I would endup parceling my leftovers for him or when I visited the local bakery, i would get an extra meat puffs (his favourite) for him. Whenever I go out on my motorbike, he waits eagerly at the gate for me to come back, by listening for the sound of my motorbike. In the daytime, its is a timepass to watch him sleep hugging himself into a furball. I wonder why people say, "I work like a dog ", coz all that the dogs seem to do is sleep all day! I slowly learned that Pattichan was not that loyal, probably the reason why his previous owner left him. Nowadays even though he spends most of his time outside, I still like him and give him a good pat on his head when he comes back. However naughty he gets, whenever he sadly looks into my eyes and wags his tail, my heart just melts.

Nokia 6110 Navigator

This is the new Super Gadget slider phone from Nokia that has GPS Navigation apart from other cool features. As camera find its place in every phone in the market, GPS is the next must have feature thats going to revolutionize the mobile phone market. Nokia 6110 uses Smart2Go softare for GPS-Navigation and seems to be superior to the one used in Nokia N95. All you need to do is, input your destination and the 6110 will automatically do the complex calculation of building your route to your destination with aplomb. The most admirable is the voice navigation (comes pre-installed with various voices - male/female and some language packs), so that you don't even have to look at the phone in case you are driving and if you missed a turn, the 6110 automatically rebuilds an alternative route to your destination. Its a good phone to have, especially for those couples who argue on the car over directions.

Some of the drawbacks of this phone are that the keypads seem very hard and at times look unresponsive (but you will get used to it). There is no wireless or infrared on board the 6110 and it does not support Stereo Sound on bluetooth headsets. The slider is hard to respond (Nokia claims this an incorporated feature so that the phone doesn't accidently open, starting another function while navigating in a car) and the sales package doesn't come with a car mounting kit. Inspite of all these, I still feel its a good phone to have, but the 6110 seems to be overpriced near to $600.

Now lets look at the good sides of this phone. Its a stylish 3G phone with a sharp bright screen (QVGA with 16 million colours), sporting a GPS-functionality stand-alone key on the front panel for easy GPS access. The mirror layer for the display makes it easy to see the display even in the sun and the handset also has a light sensor to adjust the backlighting based on the light conditions. Every single 6110 user would say that this phone has a superb sound quality and the volume of the back speakers are really good. This 6110 has 2 cameras, a 2M pixel camera with a shutter (the camera can be activated by opening the shutter) in the back and a 3G camera in the front. The phone allows a microSD card memory addition facility. Some good features of the 6110 are that it has an image editor and a video clip editor. I also liked the "Active Notes" feature on this phone, which helps you to make notes for a person in your contact list and when that person calls you, the notes will appear on your screen. Cool, rite? TTS (or Text to Speech) is another cool feature on the 6110. It reads out all your sms's, although it might sound really funny at times. I would have prefered a touch-screen for easy navigation, but then thats too much to ask for. With the Christmas season around the corner, one would be tempted to get one for yourself or as a gift. Who knows, maybe this year even Santa Claus might be using a Nokia 6110 to navigate from North Pole to your house.