Marise came over this morning to spend the last few hours before I left for Bangalore. We took a rick to the airport. One stark difference about Mumbai and Bangalore airport is the security checks. Bangalore airport is a lot stricter (They didn’t allow me to carry my bottle of water past the security point!). For a change, am actually taking a good lot back to Bangalore and so had to improvise by carrying a bigger suitcase which I checked in.

At the check-in counter I was told that the flight will be delayed by yet another 20 minutes. This was in addition to the rescheduled 35 minutes. I usually reach the airport well in time, and so this meant a wait of over two hours

The two hours wait just got extended further when the flight actually took off post 9.20pm. The original booking was for 7.35pm. Go Air flight to Bangalore has been rescheduled to 8.10pm, so even then it meant a delay of well over an hour!

Had already rescheduled the Airlift cab that I had booked for 10pm to 11pm.

The last time I flew to Bangalore I noticed the well lit, extremely beautiful Mumbai skyline. I was a bit disappointed this time since I got a perfect view of the wing of the airplane mainly!

Grabbed dinner on the plane, since the next time I eat is for breakfast tomorrow.

Just had to pick up the one bag that I had checked in and rushed to get the cab. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it on time and had to take the 12am cab which got me home by 1.30am

I resume work in another few hours. A new day in the new year! Will just take the bike in to work tomorrow. Am hoping it is a short day!

Once again, I wish you a happy and prosperous new year. Keep on reading and if you haven’t already, do subscribe.

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Sneha came over on Christmas Eve for a while before mass. Mass was relatively short and sweet. The choirs have improved since the past few years, which is a good things. Returned home immediately after mass.

I met Marise and Ruth for dinner at the 5 Spice in Bandra. Being, Christmas night, we had to wait a while before we were given a table. We definitely ordered a good deal of food and desert, a lot more than our normal capacities

Went over to Marise’s place on 26th morning to prepare for the engagement. We went over to the church in the morning itself and engaged rings and vows. After a good deal of furniture movements, to accommodate 30 persons, I went over to my ENT for a follow-up.

The party at Marise’s place was fun-filled like any of our other parties. The only difference was that we had my part of the family there too.

Got a host of presents for Christmas from Marise and her family. It was like sweeping the Oscars!

Spent the night over at her place. And, the next day we went over to her grandaunt’s place for lunch. After a bit of rest, my weary feet found their way home.

I have uploaded more photographs of the engagement. Check out the engagement album.

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Here’s a sample of photos of the engagement. I’ll upload the entire bunch in a day or two.

We had a small ceremony in church with the priest blessing the rings and we exchanging rings.

In the evening we had a family get together to celebrate the occasion.

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Had booked the tickets in August itself, so it was only the matter of getting to the airport. Unlike last time, where my cab arrived early and the plane was late, I reached the airport at 10am on Friday. They have become a lot stricter at Bangalore airport. I wasn’t allowed to even take my bottle of water past the security!

The flight was on time, but I didn’t get my usual row of seats. Was stuffed somewhere at the back, but the leg room isn’t that bad.

The flight was quick and I was home rather quickly and the first thing as usual was to reactivate my internet connection at home. This time my laptop is out of commission since I don’t have a spare internet connection.

Marise came over in the evening to spend some time with me.

On Saturday, I met up with Sneha, who had complimentary coupons for the ITC, where we feasted on a really good buffet. I ensured that I sampled all the meats and many of the deserts. (No vegetables for me!)

Went over to see the ENT in the evening. Have been suffering from a bad ear ache in addition to my usual nose trouble, so it was high time I got this checked. Also need to visit an ophthalmologist this time.

Went over to Marise’s place on Saturday and we watched Avatar on Sunday. Had booked the tickets for the 9.30am show at PVR, since they were a lot more affordable than the normal shows!

Returned home via Bandra. Got a lift from her and her family, who were on their way to Bandra. We took the Bandra Worli sea-link which was my first trip on the new bridge. It has been done well and looking up at the suspended portion at night is beautiful.

Spent the entire day at home today. Had a visit from Swagatika, who I met after nearly two and half years. Have a lot of catching up to do with a lot of friends!

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That is something that I have been feeling off late. Well, blame it on my exhausting job. In my line of work, the only thing that keeps us going is the level of enjoyment we have at work. Otherwise, I am sure I wouldn’t have survived! On the work front, I’ve been working non-stop on a good number of weekends!

Marise came down last month, so I finally got to spend sometime with her. Though, I must confess that I am one of the most boring hosts ever.

The only two places we really went visiting was Star Bazaar, to pick up much needed supplies, that would last us over the weekend. We also dropped in at one of her friend’s place for dinner.

I had an extra day off in which I tried really hard to complete a new version of Better Search. However, I wasn’t very successful, since I had to scrap much of the changes.

I also realised that the feature rich Media Temple wasn’t the best solution for this blog. I’m really surprised at the kind of resources this consumes, but I almost shot way over the 1,000 GPU cycles. Had to move my blog out of there in a hurry. By my estimates, I would have easily had to pay $20-30 more.

So, I finally took the plunge into a VPS yet again. This time I decided to give ServInt (aff.) a shot, since it had a really good plan.

Spent a good portion of the week after that optimising the server. Am pleased with the results so far. I’ll make a post on Techtites sometime soon on basic optimisation tactics.

On the fun angle, to bid farewell to one of our colleagues, we went off to Purple Haze on Friday. It’s a nice pub in Koramangala. It was a good break after the crazy work life.

And, in another six days, I’ll be in Mumbai!

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Met Sneha on Wednesday for dinner. Dinner was at the Happy Singh, which is a part of Pop Tates. Decent enough joint, but the long island iced tea was ice tea!

I met up with Idea Smithy for tea on Thursday. We met at Crepe Station in Lokhandwala which has recently opened. IMO, while the place is decent and the food too, it is over priced. So, you need to pick and choose what you would like to eat. The conversation resolved around blogging, writing, education and a bit of food.

I met up with Marise after this and we headed over to Bandra to Sheesha. We ended up sitting at the same place as we had during our last visit. The food is definitely good and so are the mocktails, however they really need to put a few fans and lights in that place!

Went over to Marise’s place on Saturday afternoon. Before that we stopped at the Airtel “relationship center” in Bandra. The relationship center is a real joke because for any support you need to call up the customer. For all users of Airtel, make sure you check your bills carefully. I was billed Rs. 100 for downloading two games which I never did and more, don’t even know to download from where. This isn’t the first time I have seen Airtel incorrectly bill users. Had to yell at the customer care dude who promised that it would be rectified in 24 hours. I am totally clueless as to which planet this 24 hours belongs to. I have decided to discontinue this account. I’m not sure which is worse, Airtel or Reliance! At least Reliance didn’t try to bill me incorrectly!

We also went over to the Vodafone center, which in my opinion is a much better service. I guess that is what differentiates a multinational company than a company run by a bunch of greedy Indians. I guess this is one of the things that pisses me off about my country. If this was the US or UK, you could take the company to court and win! Out here, you don’t have the years of your life to do that.

Marise and me, along with her family and Rixon, caught the late night show of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past at PVR in Phoenix Mills. I will write a review of the movie sometime later.

I stayed over at her place and we returned home the next day. I spent the last few hours at home getting an haircut and a shave. Set off for the airport to catch the Go Air flight to Bangalore.

The flight was perfectly on time, unlike on my journey to Mumbai. Mumbai looks really beautiful from the air and even better at night. The new Bandra-Worli sealink has beautified the landscape and it was my first view of the link.

If you haven’t seen Mumbai from the air, then check out some beautiful pictures of the same. But at night, it is even more beautiful. I could see the entire shape of South Mumbai. The journey was comfortable except for the occasional bit of turbulence that we faced.

The Airlift that I had booked was already at the airport. I had to wait a while for the remaining passengers and we headed back. Reached home in about an hour. Did a bit of blogging and then went off to sleep.

And, Monday, work began as usual!

However, Monday was a bit eventful. Vincent managed to get the road tax for my bike done on Saturday and so we set out on our bikes to the Bajaj Service Center which is in HSR Layout. They did a good job on the bike and it is running beautifully! We both headed home after work at about 12am and I froze in the cold. Didn’t have my jacket, but I also realized that I need to pick up a thicker jacket.

Yesterday, I was the only person in my cab so I reached home rather quickly

The problem is that the sleep is constantly disrupted as I need to wake up before 10am as the water goes out here. This water problem is a big pain in the a**.

I met Marise in the evening at the Subway near my place. My once regular joint has become a once in a few months joint.

We had the “sub of the day” which turned out to be the Chicken Meat ball, which was also the first time that I had this sandwich.

And today, we went off to Dynasty. We were rather disappointed by the food out there today. While the spicy crab meat soup was good, we were left hunting for chicken pieces in the chicken schezwan noodles. Took a rick straight home after this.

Tomorrow I have crab for lunch

Began the Saturday by picking up some chocolates from Monginis and getting myself a much needed shave. After which, I went over to Marise’s place to help out. Didn’t do much of helping except for the hanging of the balloons and moving the furniture to prepare the house for 30+ guests who would trickle in the evening.

Lunch was at home itself, and my darling made every effort and succeeded in feeding me a few vegetables

I also picked up a 1TB hard disk and a 500GB portable hard disk as well as a new battery for my laptop. I finally have a good 2.5+ hours of backup time, much needed in a city like Bangalore.

The person to come in the evening was Rixon, who was also there in the morning to help out. The batch to come in were Sneha, Arijit, Akshat, Neha and Aditya. Marise had managed to arrange this surprise for me and managed to invite all my friends. The most surprising of them all was Aditya who flew down from Chennai for the party! Thanks dude!

Well, he did get his money’s worth when they mercilessly beat me up!

The party was in the usual characteristic style, with games, singing and dancing, cake cutting and lots of good food.

So, once again I booked my tickets via Go Air. However, this time it wasn’t a Rs.3,000 return as I got it last month. It was a full 2k more and well, it is well worth it!

I booked the Airlift, which is a really good investment when you are travelling to Bangalore airport which is a good 50+ km from city-limits. My mistake was that I booked the cab for 8am, which arrived earlier than that and I landed up at the airport about 9am! And, as luck would have it, my flight was delayed by a good 30minutes, so my wait at the airport was well over three hours, in which I spent a good amount of time in the Barista at the airport.

It was also interesting to watch people wearing masks all over the airport in fear of contracting H1N1 which seems to have ravaged the country! This was even more in Mumbai which is also one of the epicenters of the pandemic. In my opinion, the whole thing has been overhyped, since, there are more persons dying of other illness than the total suspected H1N1 cases. Anyway, some protection is better than none!

Being Independence day on the 15th, there was extra security checks at the airport. In fact, our luggage was checked twice. Once by the normal security and once by the Go Air personnel. On reaching the plane, there was a lot of confusion and I gathered some information that there was confusion about the number of passengers. We finally took off almost an hour late, but the flight was really smooth and we reached Mumbai rather quickly.

I dozed off on the flight when the exhaustion finally crept up on me! I landed at Mumbai airport and had to walk a small distance to get an autorickshaw guy willing to go by the meter and not trying to fleece me! Gosh! They think I am not from Mumbai!

Found a rickshaw guy home and I first stopped off at my local cable operator to renew the internet connection at home. Marise came over later in the afternoon to spend some quality time with me.

I went to meet Sneha afterwards and Arijit joined us for a quick dinner at Pizza Hut.

And, yesterday was Marise’s birthday celebrations. But, that’s for another post!

Two days prior to that Sneha got placed. It was also the same day that Namrata manage to break a leg (and I?m not talking show business) while shopping. She sure got fussed over for two weeks.

My first written paper was for World Class Management on 26th of March and the paper turned out to be a real bouncer for the entire batch. We still await results, which are due in June / July.

On 26th we all set out for Sneha?s treat at Sigri in Dhole Patil Road, Pune. I had been to Sigri last year for one of the many admissions treats and liked the place. This time we went with the Barbeque buffet and it was simply fabulous. I stuffed myself up with fish, prawns and chicken and washed it all down with three triple scoops of strawberry ice cream.

And, the next day, I went out with the Admissions Team, viz. Anoop, Maria, Radhika and Ravi. Rashmi also joined for dinner. We went over to Rajwada, which I had visited once. The service at that place is painfully slow, but the food is decently edible.

We intended to stop off for ice cream and stuff but rushed to catch the last bus back to college.

The remaining days at SCMHRD were two more papers and a viva, lots of clearance forms and final packing as I headed back home to Mumbai.

The last week in Mumbai was actually just a few days as I got my belongings ready for transportation to Bangalore. Marise was a real blessing as she helped me a great deal with all this. During the time we manage to spare some time to visit Tunga?s Something Fishy, where we drew up our highest bill ever over prawns and fish and Zodiac, a place I haven?t been to since a very long time.

The transporters picked up all my stuff on Saturday and I dropped my bike over on Sunday before I flew down to Bangalore. The driver who received me at the airport was a very chatty guy and pointed out quite a few places as we passed them during the 90 minute drive to the guesthouse.

Today was the first day at work and was an excellent day. I like the place here. This week, I plan on searching for a good 1BHK in Bangalore.

BTW, in all likelihood, this may possibly be my second last post to be filed under College. The last possibly be the results, if I have the time!