When the code for daily weather was being written down, an incrementing variable was introduced for Chennai, India. 

varWeather = hot;

varWeather = varWeather +1;

This for loop dips only when the season refreshes itself and sets the initial variable to 0. In other words I know its hot today, it would tend to mean that it is hotter tomorrow. Ah there is a heavy downpour today. Schools close. Yay! What do we see the other day? Yes, I hear you.

It is the same for Bengaluru, India, except that the increment is not by 1. But by a smaller variable. And it begins with

varWeather = chilly;

But no, not with Enschede, the Netherlands.

It is almost like someone wrote the script and sent it to the Testing team. The testing team threw in a random number generator to test the code. And sent it off to production without removing that. Developers - You can imagine!!

The result was Enschede can’t simply make up its mind. It doesn’t know whether it should rain or it should shine. A cloud of doubt always hangs over. (Desperate Puns!!)

The same could be extended to the Netherlands. Trust me when I say I have seen hail, rain, breeze, sunshine and snow in the SAME day. The random number loop runs at random intervals.

Isn’t weather such an unpredictable and beautiful thing? It is so crazy that it makes up for the lack of hills here. 

Ah! Spring in Netherlands must be wonderful, you might say. Darned rains, the foreigners say.

To Coffee and the free flowing … thoughts, I mean thoughts. 

   Bengaluru – The Silicon Valley of India was my holiday for a year. A holiday from home and responsibilities. It all began with the envelope from Cognizant. When it arrived, it came along with a spicy sweet notion of me having to travel.

Travel – Bring it on I say, but the thought of staying away for God knows how long in a foreign city gave me the creeps. Yes it is a foreign city. A city where it’s bloody cold all the time. A city where prettiness was abundant. A city that goes to bed by ten o clock no matter what the day of the year was. Yes, weirdness all of them.  

The high of this city is its mundane richness that it provides so comfortably amidst greenery and a cooler climate. But I am a guy who prefers sweats to chills, mind you! Bengaluru greets you with fog infused sun rays that tickle you up from sleep like a mother waking up her new born. But dare wake up before the sun and you go all buzzer deaf in your ears with that ear invading chill.

And I checked the check box almost all professionals seem to tick these days. Being the IT guy. My encounter with the IT kind was grandiose. Towering buildings, Reach-n-Grab fast food counters and never ending pathways. It seemed like the entire Bengaluru came here for their day and night jobs. Like planktons in an ocean.

And not to forget the sinfully pretty roads. Yes I am not talking about the traffic jams. Ignore them, and you find yourself in such a beautiful city. It makes you think you became rich wherein the city quietly sips off your funds in ways Chennai would have never dreamt off.

The Sky Bar at UB tower, Metro rail, MG road, Cubbon Park, Bannerghata Park and a sports resort were all the check boxes that have been ticked.

Traffic? Please move on.

Food. In. Bengaluru. Oh! Mahn! Its to DIE for. The themes, the cuisines, the locales and for many other crazy reasons, I give it to Bengaluru. From the Mosque Road’s roadside specialties to Posh Island themed restaurants, Bengaluru gives you a lot of options.

Did you know that the maximum any Tom, Dick or Harry can charge for a movie ticket in Chennai is 120/- tops. Note. MAXIMUM. Now switch to Bangalore. Prices start from 150. I mean. Like. Whateva. Hail Pirate Bay. I can buy a 16 Mbps internet plan at cheaper prices and suck the living soul out of any movie.

Guess what construction companies do during their tea breaks. Build malls. Hey, there is a farm on the outskirts of Bangalore. Lets build a mall. Hey, there is free land in my back yard. Lets build a mall. Hey I forgot my phone at home. Lets build a mall. No, I wasn't getting carried away.  

Autowalas? I don’t know what people hate about them so much, but having stayed in Chennai for a fat duration, I pity them. I almost blurted out “That much only a!” during the first few days in the city, but slowly the locale’s irate seemed to rub on to me.

The people here are very hard to judge. Bangalore, is like a huge bowl of mixture. You find number plates all the way from Russia to Australia.OK FINE! From all over India. The city showcases the entire Indian demographic.

Bengaluru – I thank you for all the memories and fun that you have given me. In short it was quite a pleasant stay. Stay classy.

There was this moment that I remember ever so vividly. It took place after I finished the God of Small Things. As I put the novel down, I witnessed a literature that struck the right cords of my emotional scale. I have had no such feeling for any other man made novel. As I read the last words of the novel, Naalai, I felt heavy and wanted to sit down and shed tears for each of the characters in the book. Being the sensitive animal deep down, there was a lump in my throat. The book not only being heart wrenchingly pitiful, it made you connect and savor the turbulence the people in the novel go through. The drama was domestic pulsating a stronger sting. A stronger sorrow for Pappachi and Velutha’s life.
And then I read Baumgartner’s Bombay by Anita Desai. On a scale of 0 – 10, 10 being God of Small Things Level, it scores a straight seven. This story, having way less tragedy than GOST, takes you through several journeys. Journeys of Time, continent and culture.The story walks the life of a self proclaimed reject, Baumgartner born in Germany and traces the entire thread of his life till Bombay. Set in a period where the world was maturing and wars were fought with more vengeance and machinery, Baumgartner identifies himself with the common reluctant Indian. Yearning for a chance to meet his mother, Baumgartner soulfully searches company yet keeps them at bay. Solitude was his forte.  Anita Desai, carefully captures the pre-war and the post war India. The India that shined and the India that warred within. Events wash Baumgartner in its waves as he walks aimless and lost. Replete with domestic imagery of India and her forlorn street dwellers, she shows us the gap between the well off and the poor. Her imagery is so splendid and rich that you get lost in her million ways of offering scenery to you. Garnished and prettied like the offering to an Idol. She wrestles with words twisting them and makes several genuine adjective marriages seconded by Arundhati in the Indian stage. Though the ending was written to exact empathy from the reader, it could have had a stronger note. 
If you love literature, of the sort that sucks your soul like candy leaving you empty, hopeless and lost yet fully conscious of the truth that hovers like mosquitoes on the evening of a rainy day, you would love this book. The book spews with the delicacies of life and how India never turns her head away to anyone who knocks her door.   

Prologue: “Here is an attempt at explaining the rules governing a Story and a brief study if not detailed on its aspects.”

If one was to define a Story and required a layman’s one page guide here goes.

A Story is a simple, almost cost free of conveying a message or rather presenting a certain collection of events in a manner as to provide a collective approach to a certain goal otherwise called climax.

To explain it in a school based method, the main elements of a Story are

S-Structure

T-Time

O-Order

R-Relish

Y-You

A story is a multidimensional element. With the ever perpetual and flowing aspect of time, a story is described and woven intricately along the lines of the flow in such a manner than once the aspect of time and space is removed, the story ceases to exist.

A story is generally placed as a sequence of events that flow forward backward or are displayed as varied pieces of puzzles that can be fit together in a manner as pleasing by the reader's mind but majorly dictated by the written matter.

A story when read generally is sensed by the higher areas of the brain and the readers mind creating a visual space accessed only by the reader's mind portrayed in a way such that though the context and the content of the surroundings are defined by the words, the description and magnanimity are entirely left to the reader. 

Much like an inception as described by Christopher Nolan.  

Feel is another dimension. As the theme being described by the writer is placed in a reader friendly mind space, the story can have a lasting effect only when the events being described affect the higher intelligence of the brain being emotion, sentiment and bonding with the theme of the story.

Alongside the events being described, the manner in which they are revealed to the reader also has a huge impact. Plots, twists and story turns reveal a certain style of writing and decide the acceptance of story as a piece of work by the reader.

Language also adds its own beauty to the story structure and expression. Use of a proper adage in the right weight can lever the story to different heights of beauty and perception.

A story's success depends heavily on the easiness with which a person can empathize or relate to the events or the effect of the events over the antagonist.

In short, a Story is similar to the domino effect. It is necessary that along with the trigger, the path of flow is properly constructed so as to orchestrate a perfect fall. A single misplaced piece can jeopardize the whole layout depending on its angularity creating in chaos or in an inability to comprehend.

Thus the effect a story has on its reader is similar to that of a cascading fall of dominoes. After progressing to the final piece, the story’s last line, it will be clear whether the final impact of a long scripted tale has taken its toll on the minds of the reader.

The first room gave quite a description about the etymology, formation of the islands, and the list of local tribes being Andamanese, Nicobarese, Shompen, Ongese and Sentinelese, the varieties of local wood. It was quite a brilliant collection of basic information that any tourist would need to know. Wish we had covered the museums before venturing far into the island. There were also pictures of the tourist spots and water sports and several other events on the walls of the museum. The next room was an aquarium. It was small but each of the tanks were brilliantly rich in color. There were many fishes that were solely found in the corals. The entire cast of finding nemo was here, those at the fish tank where nemo would be captured. Yes, what I saw while snorkelling was here on display. Clown fishes, white lobsters, stonefish, sea cucumber, clam shells, trigger fish, sea anemone, blue starfish, sea urchin, parrot fish, butterfly fish and couple of other fishes I couldn't figure the name for. Filming all of them, I felt I wasn't simply at any other fish museum or aquarium.

The next room had a plethora of corals up for display, placed in wooden shelves and complete with fancy focus lights. The names were a plenty. If I had to name what I saw, I would say stag horn coral, finger, blue coral (poisonous – which we did see), red fan corals, marble corals, organ pipe red coral, mushroom coral, table coral and the one we saw every time underwater, the brain corals. The shells as the name suggests, were how they looked like.

The next was the shells museum that had yet another huge display of various shells and their name tags along. I was finally glad to learn the names of a few. There were couple of hornsbill turtle hoods for display. Yes, finding nemo again. The shells we saw were scorpion shells, finger, king, trochees, mother of pearls complete with a pearl in it, rare bird shell, sea horses, conus, sundial shell, silver colored albone, pink clam shell and same in white, nancowries, paper shell, mango shell, spotted screw shell, rare brown screw shell, ear shell, black mulli shell, really large bivalves, yellow mulli, turbo shells, rare converted ganesh, queen shell, nautilus, cowries – keychain, music shell, tri ton shell, horn shell, katori, pooja shell, left hand shell, Australia clam shell, plate shell, sea urchin shell.

The next room had a few displays of tribal artefacts. Canoes/hodi, fishing pans and baskets, varieties of moths, snakes and butterflies, a ten rupee note printed when Japanese took over the island, couple of bow and arrows used for fishing, tribal cloth made of wood and a model of a hut.

And thus we were done with the museum. We were on a time crunch, with three more museums to go and the need to board the flight back to Chennai at 1.

Yet another short drive to the Cellular Jail Museum, we experienced a soft drizzle, with the rain greeting us again for the day. The cellular jail had museums open till 4 or something, after which tickets are sold for the light and sound show. The museum was initially built as a star with seven feet. Only three of the rows remain today. Before we went into the jail, there were galleries on either sides of the entrance. The first one I entered had a display of the sack cloth that was used when the prisoners were being punished. There were also models that displayed the three kinds of fetters used, bar, chain and cross bar. A replica of the jail was also seen, that housed all the 7 rows. A display of the 100, 50 and 10 rupee centenary coins was also seen. 

Moving forward, I could see a huge mortar and pestle, black in color and a spike on the ground closeby. The coconuts were ripped open using the spike and the huge pestle was turned around by a bar that jutted out. This was an oil mill that drank most of the sweat and blood of many prisoners here. I just stood there by the magnificent machinery and couldn't seem to put myself into place how the cell mates could have toiled here. It was scary. Beside this torture device, there was also a frame that had two wooden columns on each side and a short bar where a belt was used to fasten the prisoner face first on the platform and lashes could be delivered to him from behind. The model in its very form was the scary reminder of human torture and pain our freedom fighters faced.

I stood by, watching the shameless frame gleaming in the light. A few utensils used were also on display. Leaving the horrifying imagery behind, I moved on to another gallery where the pictures of most of the revolutionaries imprisoned here were on display, categorized on the conspiracies and the terror they created within the British skin.

A short flight of stairs led to an art gallery. Various artistic rendition of ‘Kala Pani’ and the isolated island jail was brought out in different art forms by many Indian artists. They circled around the theme of death and scarcity of kindness. Each experimenting different shades of colors somehow had a blackish element buried. It was a brilliant collection. The room adjacent to this gallery was entirely dedicated to Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Newspaper cuttings, charts, paintings, sayings and models of the great freedom fighter were placed across four different walls. Grazing through these gave one a deep understanding of the legend.

Moving on we entered the main grounds of the museum. The garden was maintained well between two rows of the jail. It opened with a Swantantara Jyoti and Matyr’s column on the left. The jail rows were in its primitive form, bricks aged black and a few signs of faded new paint. The three stories of jail cells towered over us and there was a watch tower right at the centre of the complex. Approximately 33 cells in each floor of a cell, they all overlooked the space between them. Four of them had been demolished, two by the Japanese and the rest by the Indian Government. The cells were simply a small room with no toilet facilities. Pots were provided for the same. The prisoners were locked in from 6 in the evening to 6 in the morning. There was small ventilation at the back of the cell and was high from the ground. The entrance to the cell was small and a huge iron bar was used to lose shut the same. Entering one was eerie. It was frightening to imagine being inside a jail that witnessed inhumanities of the worst degree. I was shaken a bit. Veer Savarkar’s cell was special. It was confined to the corner of one of the rows and was in the second floor. His cell had an extra iron gate and faced the gallows below. He was unlucky to witness the hangings of every soul that was sentenced. Death lurked at every corner. Even now, as I recount the day’s travel, a shallow sinking feel grabs my stomach. Passing on, we got to the top of one of the spokes of the jail and saw a spectacular view of the neighbouring Ross Island in the distance.

Climbing up the central tower, I came across a huge overturned fulcrum. This was lighted up when people were hung, as a signal to ships far off. On the grounds there was a First War of Independence Gallery that had news paper clippings and pictures of revolutionaries who had a hand in the first war of Independence. Moving forward we came towards a short platform painted in white. This was where people performed their last riots before moving towards the gallows. The gallows stood close by, a demon of a room. Here the sense of death was more profound. Three ropes hung by a wooden bar that hung across the ceiling. On the floor there were three circles drawn and filled with white paint marking the spot where the unfortunate would stand. We also walked underneath the floor and saw a rectangular room whose walls must have faced many helplessly twitching legs supported by a broken neck.

Shrugging and pulling myself in the chill, I walked towards the car which started off for the next museum. The last museum that we could afford seeing for the day was the Anthropological Museum. It was a more modern building with a great tile art in the front facade of the building. The building housed two floors of extensive detail, exhibits and models of the aboriginal people that inhabited this land. There were complete documentation and display of the Jarawas, Sentinelese, Great Andamanese, Ongese, Nicobarese and Shompen people and their daily lives. Lifelike models of canoes and huts were also on display. It was quite a brilliant museum and I must suggest you see the video for a lot is there to see and understand.

Thus our slated tour had come to an end and we were on our way to the airport. Regretting not having done extensive shopping, we boarded the jet airways flight back home. I was still in for a final treat.

The airfield was surrounded by hills and a beautiful panorama. Sadly, the video camera’s charge depleted before I could take a final shot of the brilliant take off.

But switching over to the digital camera I managed to muster some shots of a brilliant air view. The runway itself vanished into the horizon engulfed by a clouded sky and a leafy ground. As the plane nosed into the sky, clouds fogged the ground below.

What I witnessed below was a brilliant display of the earth’s beauty isolated from the rush of life in the mainland. Being in Saudi Arabia for a large portion of my life, runways were mainly yellow and deserted with sand lying everywhere. The Chennai runway was more of a brilliant haven with its tufts of trees interspersed between sprouting buildings. But what i was seeing here was more of the extraordinary. A brilliant painting, a complete landscape, a wonderful design. The land had everything; islands, marshes, rivers, estuaries, hills, roads and whatnot. it was a wonderful concoction of beauty I say. I glimpsed a navy building INS Utkrosh. 

There was also the defence airport nearby it seems. Photography was prohibited thereby.

I must suggest you see the takeoff video. Mucho brilliance. As the plane flew away from the land below, there was a clear demarcation of land and sea separated by several boundaries. There was an extended line of beach; you could see posh green with a stark yellow lining. Then came the growling sea marking a line of waves parallel to the beach. And in between the beach and the waves there was the indigenous coral reef imparting a mix between green, yellow and white. Stunning. As we flew above the clouds, I saw a striking similarity between the land below and the sky. Clouds were scattered and were in various sizes and shapes. 

At one point, I saw a war going on, with chariots and people running. It was a haywire display complete with two armies fighting against each other. Also a little further, I noticed clouds appearing equally displaced from each other as if trees in a forest and now and then a larger cloud similar to hills and mountains. The clouds cast their shadows on the massive pool of water below which was only disturbed by the faint breeze that rippled its surface.

Time flew along with the plane and I was nearing mainland. I glimpsed the line of familiar buildings and roads as we neared ground. Truly Andaman was an island apart, a special experience. A soothing of senses. A brilliant Indian beauty, rich in history, culture and geography. I must say we did the right choice picking Andaman. You plan one too.

And thus ends my Andaman story.

Day 4 at Havelock greeted us drizzling. It was a perfectly set weather. But one that usually kills tourism plans. But we liked it. It was cold and wet. The setting of our cottage was such a relaxer. A breakfast on the house followed. I tried out the camera in the mild sun lit morning. We managed to get out of the place but were sure we would never be warm or dry.

The rain did not die. It rather stayed on like an unwelcome guest. Our fishing plans had to be cancelled. It seemed fish do not stay near the surface when it rains. It seemed unfair. They were water creatures anyways.

Skipping over, we were taken to an offshore island; a short travel by a dinghy. Yes it was still raining. After a while, he stopped at an island were we changed to swim clothes. A guide took us one by one into the sea and showed us the corals by snorkelling. While we waited for our turn the rest of us got to splash in the neck high sea shore. It was freaking fun. We waited until all of us had our turn and then finally had to start after a while so we could change and start for the ferry at 3 something back to the mainland.

After spending a while back at the hotel, the cottage type ones, we walked to the beach to get a brilliant morning view. It was perfect as it is. The chairs and all, set facing the sea with a wave less descent to the sea. It looked like our own swimming pool.

After a while we started off to the port and had lunch. Bengali restaurant. And waited for our ride back home to Port blair. The ship came and off we started. The ferry back wasn’t as much exciting cause it was sickly crowded. Passengers from two different ships were bumped into one. Finding a place to sit was exhausting as was the ride. Finally after three damned hours we were home.

We learnt that our rooms at the Emerald view were booked in our absence. And so the travel guys bumped our stay to another awesome sea facing cottage. Yes sir another bamboo roofed, walled and floored rooms, two of em. And a brilliant restaurant were we had buffet. The paths around the place were mostly inclined, flanked by properly trimmed bushes and differently colored flowers.

We couldn’t figure out the sea line as it was dark. Well that is a story for the next day. We had to bid adieu to Andaman the next day.