Ambarish's musings

Have you ever wanted to go on a trip so desperately? Just get out of the mundane? See incredible sights? Experience something visceral? I wanted to. And my college gang wanted to as well I guess. We planned for a grand trip to the north once before as well, only to abandon it for some lame reason. But not this time. This was it. The planners were on fire, citing places worth visiting. Trekking is a prerequisite in our trips. Somehow most of our group agreed to come and make this an unforgettable trip. So the fun actually started around 10 days before. Conversations from Pune to Bangalore to Hyderabad to Delhi about where to go, what to do, who will make the bus reservations etc. etc. From Kheerganga, we came to Great Himalayan National Park, and then finally settled on Patalsu for trek. What about the other days? Kasol and Manali were the chosen places. Everyone gathers at Delhi, then we leave for Manali, and then return back to Delhi was the plan. What about stuff to buy? I had ...

Organizing my travels has always been a headache. And most of all sharing them with people. Do you find yourself frequently thinking, "Where was this picture taken?" or "How do I share my travels with my family?" Introducing a panacea for your problems, Oleka! Oleka is the brainchild of one of my friends, who goes by the name Prashant Aher. I know this guy from VNIT, and this is a guy who solves problems elegantly. He and his cronies, who are my friends, have designed this wonderful app. Now that I have said enough, it is show time. You might remember I recently went on a trip to Coorg. I shared some of the pics on Oleka. Here they are: The landing page after logging in The Coorg trip that I created. Look at the different places it has tagged the photos under. That is intelligent. A particular photo and a memory attached to it A great UI design to complement the great idea itself. Here is the link for the app...

A state holiday comes on a Friday, and we pass up the opportunity to go somewhere? No chance. After a lot of plan changes, we went to Coorg, one of the smaller hill stations of Karnataka. We meaning, me, Brilliant, Kid, Enigma and Beautiful. Bangalore is so lucky that it has so many hill stations and sightseeing places nearby. The story of Coorg is quite funny. After booking tickets to Bangalore and securing an Innova for 3 days, we had the liberty to choose a destination. Ooty or Coorg? It went down to the wire, and was eventually decided by the non-availability of a state permit. Thus, Coorg became our host for the 3 days. Bangalore, or Bengaluru now, to Coorg is a very beautiful 5 hour drive via Mysore, or Mysuru now. Man, every city is renaming itself, what is up huh? Anyway, we stopped at a restaurant in Mysuru for lunch. I have been to Mysore before, and I still cannot believe how green the city is! Kudos to Mysore, for keeping the city clean and green. A few minutes later,...

Eyes meet Eyes look away. Eyes meet again, Sly smiles appear on both faces. Eyes look away again. What do those smiles mean? No one knows. Is there something happening? No one knows. Will something ever happen? No one knows. Till the next encounter, A pair of eyes long for that pair. My first ever public attempt at poetry :P

The current domain I work in, Web development, isn't one of my favorites. I mean, just rendering HTML pages, and saving and retrieving values from database gets mundane after a while. There are things that you can learn, but I guess there is a limit to it. At least on the backend side. The frontend side is one of the evergreen fields of webdev. If you are a frontend developer, companies will line up for you. Not so much for backend developers. And the most important aspect of your domain should be, in my opinion, that you should be fascinated about it. Every day before going to work, you should be excited about stuff that you are going to tackle. This, which is something I value a lot, isn't really happening for me. I am not saying I am a top web developer, just that it does not fascinate me. I am sure many people can sympathize with me on this one. So what fascinates me? What makes me go crazy about? A short and sweet answer would be ML and analytics. I just look at the ...

Today I am going to write about something that is incredibly difficult for me. I am going to write about some of the things that make me happy, in ways big and small, and in no particular order. This list is definitely incomplete, and I am just listing out as they came into my mind. Happiness is outwitting an opponent in sport(table tennis, badminton) Happiness is watching someone play a shot I encouraged them to, and win the point(table tennis, badminton) Happiness is watching Arsenal win. Happiness is watching Arsene Wenger put on a huge smile on his face. Happiness is watching Arsene's poker face when he toys with the media about transfer targets. Happiness is playing badminton. Happiness is hitting a perfect smash. Happiness is winning a long rally. Happiness is reading Arseblog every afternoon. Happiness is reading Runjhun Noopur's posts every day. Happiness is reading the exploits of Babur, as he set out to become the next Timur. Happines...

Have you ever danced so much that you had absolutely no energy left? Like, cannot move yourself to the nearest water tap? Cannot walk to the nearby seat? And, after dancing so much, did you ever feel like you wanted to dance more? How rewarding was it? It feels amazing, I know. First things first, I cannot dance. I do the ganpati dance, that too occasionally. I mean I can't do real dance. Real dance steps. I guess I never really learned dancing. Never in school, nor in college, definitely not in the company. I have not picked up a dance form, and tried to learn it. But yeah, I want to learn though. If I can get more hours in my day, I would definitely spend a few of them learning to dance. What captivates me in a dance? The fluidity of the dancers. There is nothing more mind blowing about a dancer than his/her fluidity of body movement. Not all possess it, and noticing it is also quite tough. I do know some great dancers among my friends, who are extremely fluid in their...