Pit stop 1- Madurai

Leaving for Madurai my main worry had to be getting up at 5 in the morning as the train reaches my destination at that time. But the Gods helped me here and delayed the train for almost 2 hours and so i was not sleep deprived. After reaching the hotel, i banged on the door to awaken my bro who was comfortably dreaming away to glory. After having beaten him (and kicked him) to my mind's fill we started pulling each other's legs, the best job for us! Lets see, the entire fight was for his brand new mobile gifted to him by two of his college friends and that too Nokia E-series. I kept on bugging my brother telling him that his friends should know better than to buy him a pure white E-series, and i quote " Kurangide kyil poomala" ( for people who don't know malayalam, go and learn some :P). After mom and dad tried to referee the entire match we were told to freshen up and be ready by 9 but not before i was promised a new mobile, no not any series but something i will like! And then we proceeded towards the famous Madurai Meenakshi Temple.

All through the way appa quizzed me on the temple and the city. I was not spared even inside the temple. The lotus inside the temple proved to be the butt of all jokes. Appa tried to fool me saying that the lotus floated on water and i ended up checking the construction of the lotus! Stupid me, I must say. Then after a tour of the temple, which was smaller than i thought it was, we headed back to the hotel. As usual i had my siesta while everyone around me packed to leave for somewhere. On waking up i realized that our next stop was going to be Rameshwaram. That was the height of everything. All throughout my life i had been branded by my family as an atheist but i have always tried to maintain a no-temple-visit strategy. I believe that one need not visit places of worship to seek God and that my friend is an atheist according to my mom. Innumerable times have i showed the dictionary meaning of an atheist to my mom but with no avail. Only on my birthday do i enter a temple that too because mom blackmails me of something or the other. So my routine of one-temple-one-year was just a far cry out from what i experienced this summer and in one particular occasion monsoon too as i was drenched in rain when we decided to walk home from a nearby temple. And above all this my mom was whining about the fact that a trip to Pazhani was not possible! Duh. All i had to say was " Just because there were 2 senior citizens (mom & dad) travelling with us i decided that a trip to Madurai wont hurt and now you are stretching that luck. Wait till next time. I am definitely going to look for places without any temples!" And as if that was the joke of the millenium the entire family just burst out laughing. It did not end with Rameshwaram. Every place had its share of temples and i was taken to pretty much all of them. Now in Hyderabad it has come down to the fact that we go to one temple every time we go out, which comes down to one-temple-a-day! Now i keep on saying that our driver uncle himself knows how much of a temple freak my mom is, so much so that every day when me and mom go shopping he takes us to a new temple!!!Somehow i used to like the one-temple-a-year idea, at least the fascination for temples was kept alive. But now times have changed and amma has come to the conclusion that i have become more of a christian, though she considers that it to be for a secular common good!

The Plan

No, it is not a movie review...It is actually the extensive plans i had made for my vacations. Started of with plans to West Bengal. I must say that the place holds a very special place in my heart. After all i am a bengali by birth...ahem i meant place of birth. Having heard a lot about the place from mom and dad which include their childhood stories, how golguppas and jaalmoodi were the staple food when young and after having seen my baby photos there, it was like an all-time wish for me to visit my birth land again. I have always told that i would want to go see our house there and roam around all those places of which only stories i remember. I wanted to enjoy the real sandes and wanted to enjoy shopping in the Great Market which amma so lovingly describes as street-shopping is like heaven with her for i just need to chose what i want and she gets it for me in the price she wants. What do i have to complain about at the end of the day- i propose and mom disposes. So when we were looking for a place to go, it was just an obvious choice for me to suggest WB, or rather i suggested Kolkata along with a tour of the north-east. Then comes the real problem that the tour is on just for a week because Varun had only a weeks time before leaving. So that idea was dropped.

Then my cousin came up with this idea of going abroad with Varun seconding the idea. But here again there was a problem. Since i had turned 18 my passport had expired and i had to renew them, something i had put off for the end of my vacations. Never thought that me becoming an adult was going to be such a big problem! After a lot of discussions we decided to drop that idea and decided to settle for a small trip this year with the promise of an awesome tour abroad to a place (or places ;)) of my choice next year.

So after a lot of planning, deciding and vetoing we finally decided on Madurai- Kodaikanal -Pondicherry. Well in the end all that i can say was that did not prove to be the final destinations.