HYD-Pune-HYD

We travelled by road to Pune from Hyderabad recently. The drive is 550 Km
one way not including the quick trip to Lonanvala.

Find the pictures at flickr

Day 1:
We started at 7:30 in the morning by getting on to NH-9 on what turned out to be 9 hours day drive to Pune. One after another we crossed small towns of AP, then Karnatka before entering Maharashtra state. Solapur is about mid way and we decided to take the bypass to Pune.

There is a good break at about 180 Kms from Hyderabad. Owner is Mr. Mishra - very friendly. The place is clean and food is good too. Clean restrooms are scarce on the Indian highways :) For the uninitiated, here are few tips - keep plenty of munches and water for the way. Pack for drinking as well as wash. I like to throw in two large PET bottles, a hand towel and a bottle of liquid soap in the boot.

The highway is good (by Indian standards) mostly single lane, without median and occasional streches ridden with pot holes. If you drive reasonably well you can expect to average 55 to 60 kms per hour - that means touching 100s occasionally. The highway is lined by sunflower farms and small hills around Solapur.

You can also cath the magnificent view of Naldurg fort just before Solapur from the NH-9. We hit Pune at about 4:30 pm. First stop - Magarpatta IT park where I met old friend of mine - Anurag. We stayed with Anurag and family for first night.

Day 2 and 3:

Next two days we spent exploring the city - Deccan Gymkhana, MG Road and Lonavala. We moved to Deepak's house on Karve Rd. We also met Deepak Joshi, who recently got married. It was simply wonderful. Also met Arun and Ravi. Arun is my college professor, first mentor and first boss too (not in the pictures). I also made a quick trip to my college.

Poona city was a bit of a let down. It is no longer the sleepy town it used to be. It is almost a big city with lot of traffic and crowd. Some of the old haunts are, surprisingly, still intact :). It took some time to get to them but they are there. Even the good-old JAWS is there - but I think it is closed down now and building is up for sale. Alaka talkies, Marzorin Café, Boocha Electricals, The Place for sizzlers, Dorabjee's which has now turned into a magnificent store.

A pleasant surprise was Bombay Poona Expressway and Magarpatta IT Park. We reached Lonavala in less than an hour. A tip when on the road and ordering tea or coffee - ask for sugar to be served separately :)

Day 4:

We started the journey back on the morning of the fourth day a little late packed with vada paos and kanda bhajji!! The highways are begining to get lined by Reliance gas stations attached with amneties and there was one just outside Pune. But it was filthy and coffe was yuck too. I hope these are just teething troubles and they will get better in coming days.

I caught several magnificent pictures of rural India. Hope you like them too. Send me a note.

Find the pictures at flickr

Indexed under Travelogues.

Chicken in minutes

OK, the email publishing does work. Just need to be little careful
about the line length and format of the email(has to be plain text
format).

As I perfect the art of blogging via email here is a little recipe I
perfected during my stay here in Cincinnati. It is easy and it takes five
minutes - OK fifteen - the point is - it is quick.

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Content:
1) Ingredients
2) Preparation
3) Cooking Instructions
4) Other suggestions

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Ingredients for Chicken in minutes
o Chicken two pieces
o Salt, pepper, paprika, clove, cumin and any other spice
you care for (all as per taste)
o Lemon juice (two tea spoons)
o Butter (preferred yellow) one tea spoon

PLEASE USE COMMON SENSE WHILE COOKING AND IF YOU HAVE
NEVER HANDLED PANS ON STOVE TOPS SEEK HELP.

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Preparation is easy
You will need a bowl to mix ingredients and a pressure
cooker.

Skin and clean the chicken pieces. You may leave the skin
on if you prefer it that way. Rub all the spices
vigorously on chicken. Puncture the chicken in few place
to allow the spices to sink in - no time for marinating :)
Sprinkle lemon juice on it.

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Cooking Instructions
Place the rubbed pieces of chicken in the pressure cooker
and put the butter and couple of cloves on it with few
cumin seeds. Use any other whole spice too if you like.
Close the lid and fire it up. DO NOT USE ANY OIL OR WATER.
IT IS NOT REQUIRED.

After first whistle reduce the flame to half and after two
more whistles it will be done. The chicken gets cooked in
its own juices and gets the flavor from butter and spices.

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Other Suggestions
If you have time and would like some curry use the chicken
prepared above in tomato and onion gravy. Serve with
boiled rice.

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If you like it or come up with variations send me an email! :)

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Indexed under Recipes

Push-Button Publishing (contd.)

Hmmm didn't go as smooth as expected. Post appeared (though not immediately) but it messed up the page format. I think the email should not have been in the HTML format. I went in edit mode after the post appeared on the page and removed the unnecessary HTML tags which fixed it.

But, the idea of posting via email is too tempting so I am going to try couple more times.



This time I am trying the text mode. Let us see if it works. Even the picture above is sent via email. The picture is that of my family who are missing me terribly as I travel.

Push-Button Publishing

It was easy!! The first post yesterday night was really really easy. Think of countless hours I spent on creating my own site [and then loose it all during the server update by hosting company :( ] this was a snap - a click.

I have a feeling that Email Publishing is going to be even better than Push-Button Publishing. It is guaranteed to get published – absolutely not going to be rejected :) – and it is fast. When I see all the settings, options etc. while creating the posts I get lost. Instead of working on the post I start to tweak the look and feel which, I feel, makes me less productive. And who wants to be less productive? :) If this works I will be posting using my all time favorite Outlook. I guess I can log back to Blog only to upload pictures.

BTW I just heard our friend Bandi’s car is not starting. Probably he left the lights on and now the battery is dead. :) aaaarrghh

I am starting to get so many ideas so here it is – clicking the Send button…

Blogging on the Christmas day!

This will be a Christmas I will remember and tell stories about. Temperatures are subzero and snow is all around us. Holiday Storm 2004, as named by the local TV station, arrived on Wednesday morning in Cincinnati, OH and offices were declared closed in the afternoon. The weather was expected to get worst in next few hours and it looked like the long weekend was kicking in a lot earlier than expected. Clicked a few snaps on the way back from office. I have not seen so much snow ever. In India, we pay a lot of money to go uphill and experience snow. :) The last time it snowed when I was in Atlanta, GA in 1995, and it was nothing. I should say flurries in Atlanta.

By Thursday, we were in at least a feet of snow. The cars were buried in heaps of snow and the apartment complex looked like a nicely leveled (huge) ice skating ring. We decided to take our friend Bandi's car out and go for a short drive. Little did we know then that cars don't go over the frozen pile of ice just like that. YOU GOT TO SHOVEL THE ICE FIRST. After about hour and half and with the help of few nice neighbors we finally managed to get the car down from the mound of ice (don't ask how it got up there!!). We were so tired and cold that we parked the car back (in different spot) and headed straight back in :)







Friday was much better as we enjoyed sliding downhill at the back of our apartment. Today, being Christmas, everything was closed anyway so we were holed up inside our apartment. While surfing TV and Internet simultaneously I heard about blogging on CSPAN (yes I watch CSPAN sometimes) and remembered that I had decide to give it a try. So here I am, blogging on the Christmas day! Merry Christmas to all of you.

Oh and, send me an email for links to album of snow pics.