And the Mountains Echoed - By Khaleed Hosseini

This one more book by Khaleed Hosseini is as beautiful as the previous two books. The plot does not have one protagonist but more than five. Some are related and some irrelevant. Some are your own reflections.

The book as usual deals with Afghanistan and human bonding. This time its between a sister and brother. They live in a small village and the father trades off the girl child saying "A hand must be cut off to save the hand". The brother - Abdullah remember's his sister - Pari all his life, but the pari does not event know a brother existed.

She is adopted by a rich family in Kabul where the adoptive father falls ill and mother abandons him and takes pari to France - Her motherland. This woman - Mrs.Wahdati, the adoptive Mother of Pari is like the most beautiful woman and a talented poet. She writes on love and lust at an young age and becomes the antagonistic child of Kabul bringing dishonor to her parents.

There is a cook cum driver at the Wahdati's called Nabi who is the maternal uncle of Pari. Nabi and Pari's father disconnect from each other after Pari's adoption by the Wahdatis. When Mr. Wahdati falls sick and Mrs. Wahdati desert him, Nabi is the one who looks after Wahdati. Mr.Wahdati falls in love with Nabi. He also wills his property to Nabi. In the mean time, Nabi would have found a diary in the Wahdati's cupboard written by Mrs. Wahdati. It says "Its all about you Nabi".

Nabi is shocked by this revelation as he was secretly in love with Neelima Wahdati. He always wished Neelima would know it. Nabi, after reading this, decides to find an appropriate substitute in the house to cook and drive and go join Neelima in Paris. But he fins no one and continue to walk Wahdati in the open fields of Kabul.

On a summer morning, Mr.Wahdati is dead and Nabi is left no where. At that time, the war is intensified in kabul and a lot of foreign help and NGOs are in Kabul to help the injured and the needy. One Markos - a plastic surgeon by profession lands at-Once Wahdati's and  now Nabi's big gate. Nabi offers to rent the house for free. Markos along with a nurse - Arma live with other volunteers in the house and Nabi lives in the small outhouse in the compound.

Nabi leaves a letter to Markos to be delivered to Pari. Markos finds Neelima Wahdati - the small time poet on the web and finds her daughter Pari. Pari now is a big grown up girl dating the man her mother once dated. When Neelima dies, Pari receives a letter from a news paper which interviewed Neelima and published her story. Pari understands that "she was a pain in the ass" for Neelima. Pari's mother was never happy for Pari.

Pari marries a honest and dedicated drama teacher from a local school. She will have three children. Pari goes on to study Phd in mathematics. Her children grow up and get married and have children. In all this time, Pari is not aware that she is missing her brother.

One day Markos contacts Pari on facebook and tells about the letter that Nabi has left. Pari arranges Markos to meet her half brother Iqbal at Shadbagh. She learns that there is an elder brother - Abdullah in America who is sending iqbal money every month.

Pari contacts Abdullah's daughter - her name too Pari and meets Abdullah. But Abdullah is unable to recall his childhood. He is suffering from some kind of cancer. Junior Pari, when she was young, used to hear bed time stories from her father Abdullah. He would tell her the story of his sister Pari and at the end, he would say that he is going to take away the bad dreams and put all the good dreams to Pari's sleep. Now Abdullah is sick and he is unable to recognize the real Pari.

The younger Pari finds friendship in older Pari and is set to meet pari's family in France. In the hotel room, both of them are sleeping and younger Pari wakes up and tells a fairy tale to the older Pari that she and her brother were young again, they are lying on the grass on the mountains in the mid afternoon underneath the cool shelter of a tree - that she can see her brother's face, but not the whole of it as she is too near to the face.

Thats the end of the book. In between there are irrelevant descriptions of Markos mother, supposedly sister,  Pari's natural mother's childhood, her twin sister, some two young boys interested in property in Kabul, etc.

The book is a fine story teller. At times, one would feel frustrated - because of a lot of abandoning women, deserting, cheating etc. It surely makes you feel depressed and pensive.

Chanakya's Chant by Ashwin Sanghi - review

Two stories almost 2300 years apart depicted side by side.

The book is about the father of Economics Chanakya who existed in India around 300 BC and a modern man - GangaSagar Mishra in the not so known Kanpur town of India. 

Chanakya  vows revenge for the gruesome murder of his beloved father. Cold, calculating, cruel and armed with complete absence of accepted morals, he becomes the most powerful political strategist in Bharat and succeeds in uniting a ragged country against the invasion of the army of that demigod, Alexander the great. Pitting the weak edges of both forces against each other, he pulls off a wicked and astonishing victory and succeeds in installing Chandragupta on the throne of the mighty Mauryan empire. History knows him as the brilliant strategist Chanakya. Satisfied-and a little bored-by his success as a kingmaker through the simple summoning of his gifted mind, he recedes into the shadows to write Arthashastra, the science of wealth.

Gangasagar Mishra on the other hand takes up the challenge of making the slum dog a corporator. He manages to get the daughter of his guru to be brought up by this slum dog so that some time in future this will prove to be a political advantage. He grooms her to be the most powerful woman of the modern India. 

The book is too much of a description and almost predictable. But it is a little bit educative too. So read this at your own risk. 

Krishna Key by Ashwin Sanghi - Review

There are 4 elite citizens in 4 parts of India with whom one Anil Varshney has trusted the 4 seals of Krishna era. They are all killed including Anil Varshney but Ravi Saini is spared. So Saini sets out an adventurous trip to find out who is killing Varshney's associates.

One day, Saini is at college when he is arrested for the murder of his friend Varshney. Saini's pupil - Priya Ratnani  come to his help and they break away from the prison and go to meet an underground radio active expert with whom Varshney has entrusted one of the 4 seals. Before the Saini troop visits the radio active expert, he is killed and his seal is stolen. Saini's own seal is confiscated by the police. Now they reach the next two friends with whom the seal is believed to be lying. In the mean time they escape twice from the strict lady police officer.

One Taarak Vakil who is trained from Mataji - apparently (Priya Ratnani) is sent to steal away the seals and murder the possessors. The same mataji is associate of Saini's quest for the truth.

The Mataji has a underworld don - Sir Khan's connection who claims to  be the descendant of Krishna. He explains Priya how the descendants of Krishna were distributed on the banks of river Saraswati and northwords and how they migrated to Afghnistan and became Aryans again settling down in northern India.
Sir Khan says that he was entrusted by his father a base plate which can house 4 seals of Krishna era. He wants Priya to delve on that and bring back his praised possession along with the 4 seals.

They search at Somnath temple, Mount Kailash and taj mahal based on the radio active fields at these places.

The message of the book is that Krishna really existed in the banks of River Saraswati in the period 300BC. He built the city of Dwaraka and after migrating from mathura. He also built the Somnath temple which was later ruined. The Mohammud of Ghazni invaded India and the Somnath temple in order to steal the Syamanthaka stone(Philosopher's stone). According to the book, Ghazni too is a descendant of Krishna who knew the power of the Syamanthaka. So he ruined the temple, searched for it, found it to be the creator of the magnetic force that keeps the Shiv Ling in the air suspended position. He took it back to Afghanistan which was later brought to India and was transferred from generation to generation.

The book looks like an Indian version of Da Vinci Code with all the thrills and chills. But it is much slow paced and demands all your patience to complete. I wish I could read this book faster. 

Prey by Michael Crichton

The plot of the book is that in a Nevada desert laboratory, an experiment has gone wrong and a cloud of micro robots - nanoparticles has escaped in to the air. These particles are self replicating and self sustaining. 

One software engineer  Jack Forman gets fired discovering an internal scandal. He becomes a house husband of Julia who is an employee of Nano biotics industry. She spends most of her time on the research which Jack misinterprets as her affair with someone. One day, she meets with an accident and jack is asked to take her role at office since her employer is having software issues with the product. 

Jack is given a tour of the lab and meets the programming team. He is shown a very complicated machine used to make the nanobots. Ricky refuses to show Jack the source code for the nanobots, and later Ricky claims that building contractors failed to properly install filters in a certain vent in the building. As a result, hazardous elements such as the assemblers, the bacteria, and the nanobots were blown into the desert, evolving and eventually forming autonomous swarms. These swarms appear to be solar-powered and self-sufficient,reproducing and evolving rapidly. The swarms exhibit predatory behavior, attacking and killing animals in the wild, using code that Jack himself worked on. Most alarmingly, the swarms seem to possess rudimentary intelligence, the ability to quickly learn and to innovate. The swarms tend to wander around the fab plant during the day but quickly leave when strong winds blow or night falls.

The nanoswarm kills a rabbit outside the complex, and Jack goes outside with Mae to inspect. They find that the rabbit died of suffocation resulting from the nanobots blocking its bronchial tubes. While Mae goes inside for equipment, Jack is attacked by the swarms. He barely manages to get through the airlock inside the lab before falling unconscious from anaphylactic shock.

Persuaded by Jack, the team decides to destroy the swarm. They believe that the swarm must have nested in the desert to reproduce. They attempt to find this nest by tagging the swarm with radioactiveisotopes and following them back to their nest at night. Under the cover of a strong wind that forces the swarms to remain dormant, the team goes outside to a storage shack to find the isotopes and build a spray device. However, as the wind dies down, four swarms attack the shack and eventually kill David and Rosie. The rest of the team are forced to take shelter in the cars parked outside. The Swarms begin an attempt to enter the cars.

Eventually, the swarms find a way to enter the cars, but not long before the wind picks up in speed again. Jack and Mae manage to escape to the lab before losing consciousness, but Charley falls unconscious outside his car after he sprays his swarm with the isotope. Bobby, Vince and Ricky refuse to go outside and help Charley. Jack, dizzy and nauseous, goes back out again to save Charley as the swarms attacks again. Using a motorbike found in David's car, Jack manages to get himself and the semi-conscious Charley to the safety of the airlock before he falls unconscious again.

As night falls, Jack, Mae and Bobby set out to find the swarms. While searching for them, they discover that one of the swarms, now so evolved that it can operate without solar energy, is moving the now deceased Rosie through the desert. They follow the body to find the swarms nesting in a cave. As some of the swarms come out of the cave after them, a Xymos helicopter arrives and traps the swarms inside the cave using its powerful draft. Mae and Jack then venture into the cave and proceed to exterminate the swarm, their nest and their organic assembly plant (which looks very similar to the original Xymos assembly plant) using explosive thermite caps. They return to the Xymos plant, exhausted.

At the plant, Jack, Mae and Bobby are enthusiastically greeted by Julia, who was earlier discharged from the hospital and was brought in by the chopper. Julia's behavior seems to be extremely aberrant: She seems to pay heed to nothing other than trying to entice Jack and kissing him, even when Charley is found dead in the locked communications room with a swarm flying around him and the communication links cut. Jack cannot understand how the swarm got inside the rigorously protected airtight building, why Charley would have disabled the facility's communications, or why Julia and Ricky seem to be coming up with various out-of-character ways of how he died.

To Jack's horror, the video not only reveals that Julia and Ricky had an affair but also shows how Charley engaged in a vicious fight with Ricky and Vince. All of them end up in the communications room where Julia kisses a subdued Charley, injecting a stream of swarm into his mouth.

Eventually, Jack and Mae realize that everyone in the facility except themselves have been infected by a symbiotic version of the nanobot swarms. These nanobots, although evolved alongside the other swarms, do not show aggressive predatory behavior. Instead, while they seem to invigorate their hosts' physical statistics and their perception, they slowly devour and take over their hosts, initially affecting their decisions and then controlling them, while allowing them to travel and contaminate others.

Jack comes up with a plan to destroy this new strain. Mae and Jack drink vials containing a form of phage that kills the nanobot-producing E. coli bacteria. The phage would protect them from infection. Jack then proceeds to take a sample of the phage and pour it into the sprinkler system and drench everyone with it. He tricks Mae into alerting Julia and the infected team. They set out to stop Jack. In the vicious struggle that ensues, Vince is killed and Jack, who barely escapes death several times, finally manages to place the sample into the sprinkler system.

In order to prevent the sprinkler system from triggering, infected-Ricky disables the plant's safety network. However, this is exactly what Jack wants, as Mae has already allowed the phage into the assembly line, causing the phage to reproduce rapidly. The assembly line is rapidly overheating because of the no longer active safety system. If Ricky and Julia do not turn on the safety system the assembly line will burst, filling the lab with the phage. The infected-team, who are now doomed either way, choose to re-activate the safety network and get drenched with the phage. Jack and Mae escape the facility in a helicopter shortly before the facility explodes due to a methane gas leak combined with thermite Mae has placed in the building. After returning home, Jack infects all his children with the phage to eradicate the potential nanobot infestation. Mae calls the U.S. Army and sends a sample of the phage to her lab.

Jack puts together all the missing links. The corrosion of the memory chip in Eric's MP3 player as well as Amanda's rash were caused by gamma assemblers. The MRI's strong magnetic field detached the assemblers from her. These assemblers were most likely brought home by Julia. Knowing this, Julia called in the Xymos special team to scan Amanda's room. The person who Jack spotted in Julia's car was in fact the cloud of nanobots. Xymos intentionally released the swarm into the desert so that it would evolve to stay in a cohesive group in the wind.

Gives a thrill and keeps you occupied for hours. 

You Were My Crush! ...Till You Said You Love Me! - Durjoy Dutta

The book is written by Durjoy Dutta. His earlier hits are like "Of course I love you till I find some one Else" and "She broke up, I didn't".

I had read one previous book of this author and i had liked his writing style and thats why I chose to read another one named "You were my Crush". This book is about a boy named Benoy who studies in Delhi university. He has a super rich, all powerful dad, a big car, hell lot of freedom and No mother.

One day he bumps in to a geen queen called Diya at college. Though initially he finds her lizard-like, he befriends her and they become very good friends. The boy Benoy falls in love with Shaina, who is Diya's sister through facebook. Diya's family is a very conservative family and Benoy is in no mood to lose Shaina for reasons whatsoever. The twist comes when Shaina brings her two year long boyfriend in to the picture. Shaina's parents want her to marry her boyfriend but Diya and Benoy want Shaina to marry Benoy. In the meantime Diya meets up with an accident and is hospitalized. Benoy and his father help Diya's family come over this and they bribe Shaina's boyfriend in to not marrying her. Benoy - on more than one occasions introspect if he is doing it right by falling in love with Shiana when he is only 20. There is a lot of father-son drama. Benoy thinks that his father is responsible for his troubled upbringing and also for his mother's death.
So Benoy's father want to win him over and tell him the truth.

The book is a sweet narration of a sweet love story. The character Benoy is depicted with all the necessary confusions of a 20 year old. His loneliness shows his dislike towards his father and  towards the world. The characters of Diya and Shaina are also awesomely made to be the world's cutest and sweetest sisters. There is a lot of sense of humor and one can enjoy being glued to the book for hours. When the book reaches the end, there is a good-will experienced by the reader. Rating it 4.5 out of 5. Reserve this book for a boring sunday afternoon. 

Three days trip to Hyderbad from Bangalore

The journey to Hyderabad from Bangalore is around 10 hrs by bus and by train it would be around 14 hrs. We left here on a cool and breezy Saturday night. Our tight budget allowed us to choose a govt owned Airavat -Sleep like a baby bus with multi-axle. The advantage of this bus over the regular airavat is that it has an extension as the foot rest(rather a thigh rest) there by which you feel like a sleeping baby in the mom's cuddle.

The bus reached at 8 AM in the MG bus stand. We did not have a clear idea as to where to take the suite for stay - which made things worse. We were attacked by a big no. of auto drivers on descent from the bus asking various questions like where do we go, where we came from, if we required hotel, lodges, eateries etc. The driver of the bus had suggested there is a certain Nandini hotel nearby. We thought of walking until Nandini but then ditched the idea and took an auto. Nandini Deluxe was full and auto driver waited for us to return so that he can take us to hotels where he gets money in return. I have written in my previous posts about my husband's affinity to Udupi hotel and hence we rejected a few of the hotels shown by the driver and took one in Nampally - Shalimar Gardens.

The hotel guy arranged for our trip to Ramoji and other sight seeing places. When the tickets were delivered to our room, only then we realized how big a supply chain management it is. First the auto driver, then the Hotel guy, then the travel agent who arranges trips, then the bus owners, drivers, guides all linked one to other.

Well, Never bother about how people suck your money out. You like it or not, they manage to keep you spending.

Our first day began with Ranoji Rao film city. This is situated on Kurnool road after the ring road junction. You have to go to Ring road that connects the Hayathnagar to the main city. By bus, it may take around an hour and the timing is 10 AM to 8 PM  When we reached, there was no much crowd and we collected our tickets(which our hotel guy+tour agent) had already booked. We were mesmerized by the enormity of the site. Inside the film city, there was a gate opening ceremony at 10. We enjoyed the celebration of the cultural dances and the Jai Hind at the end. Then we took a red bus that takes us around the film city showing the studios, the sets and the artificial gardens. The bus had a guide who showed us the card board set houses, airport, ramayan/mahabharat studio, fake cities and gardens, railway station that were used to shoot in the movies. This particular tour was an  eye opener to changed the way I would watch movies from now on. Then we watched the stunt show which showed how the fights were fought for real in movies. There is a show on how the movie is made using Sholay and Basanti. Also we get to see a lot of nice gardens. Dil Se is a good restaurant to hand out. All in all, the day ended with exhaustion and some good  memories of the lively Ramoji Rao Film City.

The second day, again our hotel guy had arranged for a city tour which in fact we ditched by mid afternoon.
First he took us to Birla Mandir and then to Nizam's museum which housed the Nizam's gifts. Then we went to Salar Jung Museum. This is one of the treasures of Hyderabad and also a must see. If you are a history lover, then obviously it requires 3 days to visit all the places in the museum. We also saw Chow Moholla palace and headed for lunch after which we stopped touring and napped until evening. In the evening, we went to iMax and watched "English Vinglish" and dined at Palace Biryani. This is the best place in Hyderbad where you get yum Hyderabadi biryani.

On the third day, we started on our own to Char Minar. It is a beautiful monument though dirtied now a days by ignorant tourists. In front of it is Mecca Masjid. One thing I liked about is the pigeons and photographing them. We then shopped in the Chudi Bazaar and headed to Golkonda fort. Golkonda is a beauty in its own. Its too vast and there are around 200 steps to reach the top of the palace. There are a no. of guides available at the site, but I prefer you buy a book on Golkonda for 10 Rs and read it on your own. It was too sunny when we started our climb. But managed to be there in just 20 min. There is also a temple on the top. We saw the shooting site of pokiri/Wanted movie on our descent. After returning from Golkonda, we headed to NTR gardens where we saw NTR's grave. We also saw Hussain Sagar. What a pity it is for the Buddha standing a midst the dirty waters of Hussain Sagar? We reached Snow world and experienced snow in Hyderabad and headed to Sukh Sagar, dined, went straight to our suite, vacated it and took back sleeper bus to Bangalore.


How to Reach: 
By Bus: Almost all private bus operators, KSRTC and APSRTC buses available during 7PM to 11PM in the night - Takes around 10 hrs
By Train: Check out the Indian Railways portal - Takes around 14 hrs
By Flight : bookings can be made from online flight websites - Takes around 1 hr

Places for site seeing:
1. Ramoji Rao Film City
2. Golkonda fort
3. Char Minar
4. Mecca Masjid
5. Salar Jung Museum
6. Nizam's museum
7. Chow Mohalla place
8. Hussain Sagar lake
9. Birla Temple and Birla Planetorium
10. NTR garden
11. Lumbini Garden(optional as Hussain Sagar water is dirty)
12.Nehru Zoological Park
13.State Archaeological Museum.

Best time to visit: Avoid summer to visit Hyderabad as summers are unbearably hot in Hyderabad

College 2 Company - Journey of an ENGINEER - Sourabh Singh

I must say its an amazing book. Sweet is the word that I would use to describe it.

The book has a rough description of how a person gets guilty by choosing to study engineering in not-so-reputed engineering college. It is often the case with majority of the engineers in the industry today.

The boy Siddhartha grows up throwing tantrums at parents and bringing them shame. He flunks every time and somehow manage to get an electrical engineering degree from an unknown college. There is a brief description how the hostel world looks like.

After college, he gets a job in  a mechanical company and possess two girl friends. He balances work, two girl friends, fun, parents and parents in law at the same time.

Book is a little concocted in the end with a flawless international love story with Angel. They get married with no difficulty and have twins. In the beginning, it is a little boring with the immature description of Hema, Radha, Ayesha, Jyothi, hostel, college etc. But end is sweet. No major events take place in the book but the whole package lightens up an engineer's soul after reading.

A good time pass for 3 hrs.

Cheers to the Engineer's life

Love @ Facebook - Nikita Singh

On one of the jobless days at office, by courtesy of my collegues, I happened to do online shopping and clicked "Books".  I browsed many books and one book caught my eye - Love @ facebook.
Since the book title involved facebook, i ordered one and got it in the following two days.

When the book was given to me, I had the least interest in the world to read anything as raw(thats what it looked like at that time. ) as that. I made more than 4 attempts to pass through the "Acknowledgments" and "Before you begin" sections. I reminded myself a thousand times that its written by a 19 year old.

There was no story, no good dialogue, no philosophy. The book looked so bland that I wondered at times how I managed to carry it all around - showing people that I read any such stupid book.

Soon, after a few initial chapters, I started to connect with the protagonist - Vatsala Rathore, She hated girls who acted like girls. I did literally hate girls who acted like girls when I was 19. She was a foodie and was eternally starved. I too am eternally starved and ready for a meal anytime. She was born on 6th Oct. I too was born on 6th of oct. Thats a lot of similarity!


Keeping personal things aside, take it from me - The book is very boring in the initial chapters. The primary set back has been that there is no enough story line and don't expect philosophy from 19 year olds. The plot of the book is that Vatsala has a boyfriend but does not notice him and develops a crush on an upcoming vj on facebook.

The vj is indifferent to her tumultuous attempts which she used to woo him. With the help of friends and family she manages to understand what Ankit(long standing boyfriend) meant to her. The ending of the book is implausible when Vatsala being a BBA student and a music person ends up getting a lucrative tv show anchoring job.

The narration is not a thing to mention, but there is a good amount of humor. More than anything, one of the qualities of the author appealed me. Nikita is very good at describing the character of the protagonist. After every sentence by Vatsala in the book, there is an introspecting statement like "Why am I like this?" or "I am always like this.", "People do this to me always", "I hate girls who act like girls", "Why do I fall in love with Ronit after every chat or why do I fall in love with ankit the moment I meet him?  Such a crazy person that I must be".  These introspecting statements lets the reader better understand the confusions and absurdity of character.

Dont buy the book until your friend buys and reads it and scraps on to you.

Pondycherry - two day trip from Bangalore

Planned to visit Pondicherry for a two day weekend outing with hubby. I booked the KSRTC volvo club class multi axle bus on Thursday and we left on Friday night. Our bus was from St.John's and we had a tough time searching for the KSRTC pick up point. We had a nice plate of chitranna and curd in the bus stop and boarded the bus for a short peaceful journey to Pondy. What I had thought was a short journey took almost 10 hrs.

After landing, we were told that there is good accommodation near the bus stand area. My husband is the kind of person who searches for Udupi bhavan/ hotel everywhere he goes. We searched for a good number of hotels and resorts before we got one next to the Udupi bhavan on the main streets of Pondicherry and we checked in for a cozy twin AC suite.

It has become a hobby that when we land on a new land in the mornings of the journey, we roam on the streets of the city after a cup of hot tea. So once we checked in we dumped the luggage in the hotel room, we had hot watery tea in the Udupi bhavan. The tea was sick. The search for other tea shops which sell good tea was not very fruitful.

I noticed that the whole of city was dirty on that sun risen morning. There were bars across every second building and people were happily littering, loitering, puking in front of the bars. There were tea stalls on the gutters. Some kerala parota stalls were lined up the road where white dough is knead near garbage junks. One scene took me by shock. A man was peeing to the high lamp post that stood at the center of a large bus stand. In the midst of 2000 people, 200 buses, 50 tea shops, how one could take out to pee without any embarrassment is what I wonder about.

The day was too sunny. The breakfast was a little better than the morning tea from Udupi bhavan. We took a share auto to go to the rock beach. The idea of going in the share auto was to know people and their life styles. At the end of the caravan, all we got to know was that, the people are too rude and no body understands a single syllable if its not Tamil.

The rock beach is a sweet place to be. We imagined that the place will have tides where we can touch waters and take a dip. But it turned out that they have cut short the shore area by throwing stones at the sea. Its breezy and lots and lots of shopping options are available for sea made items. Plenty of eateries are also present which sell french pasta, Chinese momos, manchurian, Modhak(they call with tamil equivalent), peanuts, sweet candy, bhel puri, vada, bajji etc etc..

Out of heat and humid weather, we were exhausted. We had fish for the dinner at Annaporna hotel. The specialty of Pondy hotels is that they don't serve any dish with spoon. You insist on getting a pair of spoons and it comes to you probably after you complete eating the dish.

Next day was very eventful. We took a early rise to catch the sun rise at the beach. The rock beach was not all that peaceful. There were people jogging, hogging here and there. After a long time the sun rose and it was a stunning scene. Some pics follow below.

We booked a taxi and visited Aurbindo ashram, Ganabadi temple(yes, its pronounced as Ganabadi and not as Ganapathi), Narasimha temple, Govt Museum, Auroville, a beautiful and handsome church near the railway station. All this took around 4 hours. For the afternoon we settled for the Auro beach. The water was too good for anybody to refuse it. We got wet and played all the possible sport on the beach. There were French men and bikini clad women. The bikini women, as usual had a great bunch of followers, fans and admirers. They term them all as stalkers.

We made some shopping in the Auroville and had good food to eat at the Adiyar Anand Bhavan. The evening tea was held at beach. We returned to catch the bus back to Bangalore.

How to reach from Bangalore:
By Bus: From Majestic, there are many buses that go to Pondicherry. Buses that go to Thiruvannamalai also go to Pondicherry. It takes around 7 to 9 hrs.
By Car: The route is via Hosur, Krishnagiri. Takes 6 hrs.
By Train: There is a railway station at Pondy.
By air: Airport is in Chennai and from Chennai it takes 3 hrs to Pondy.

Places to see: Aurobindo ashram, Auroviile, Thiruvannamalai temple, Ganabadi temple, Narasimha tempel, Church, Rock Beach, botanical garden, Auro beach.

Best time to visit: Oct to Dec

Kudteri Shantha Durga MahaMaya Temple

Kudteri Shantha Durga MahaMaya Temple

Recently I visited this place as this being our Kula Devatha place. Before visiting, I browsed to no end to know about the place and its surroundings. But there was no blog/site that would help to sojourn  in this place. Hence I decided to write about Kudteri Shantha Durga Mahamaya temple located in Ghudo, Avedem in Quepem(pronounced as Cafe as in Cafe coffee day). The devi is kuladevatha for Kamaths with Vochcha gothra. Kudteri is famous not only among Kamaths but among all konkanis with Vachcha gothra.

The temple is built recently - May be in the last decade. Inside the temple, there are two Goddesses. One Murthy is of Shantha Durga and other is of Chamundeshwari. The murthys are placed side by side in two different sancta sanctorum. The murthys are made of white marble stone and dressed with clothe and jewelry. There are different sevas available to be performed by the devotees which range from 20 INR to 2 lak INR. The temple also houses two - three storied lodges. The admission is strictly reserved for GSBs who have their family tress imprinted in the records of the Temple. So when you go there and want to reserve a suite, you tell a name of your ancestors and you get it booked. You can also update their records with your name and your children names in the family tree.

The accommodation is plush with a view of the forests in the backdrop of the balcony. I enjoyed being on the balcony where I could hear the birds chirping, croaking of frogs, clucking of chickens and whole lot of mysterious sounds which I could not identify. In the ground floor of the lodge, there is a canteen maintained by a certain Nitte uncle. He's been living in the temple surroundings for nearly 10 years doing seva to the Goddess by feeding the devotees. He is available 24/7 and serves breakfast, lunch and dinner along with coffee and tea during the evening times. All the temple goers visit him. His tariff is from 5 INR to 30 INR for two course meals of Dalitoy and variety of madgaNes. His Dalitoy is one of the authentic konkani delicacy that I have tasted ever. It was an ecstatic feeling.

It is believed that when the outsiders attacked on the temples of India to loot the treasures hidden in the temples, the Mahamaya temple associates safeguarded the shrine and transferred it to a remote village in Goa from West Bengal. There they hid the actual Mahamaya shrine and installed the Chamundeshwari shrine in the place of actual shrine. After many centuries, when India was independent of foreign rule, they resumed to offer prayers to Mahamaya shrine in the foreground along with chamundeshwari shrine.

Some of the pics taken here are as below:

Here is the address to reach the place:


Samsthan ShantaDurga Chamundeshwari
 Kudtarai mahamaya 
Ghudo, Avedem, Quepem, Goa - 403705
Ph: 0832-2662423
      0832-2663881
      09822131503


How to reach from Bangalore:

Train and Bus services are available to Mudgaon.
From Mudgoan, hire taxi to Ghudo, Avedem or Kudtarai(Both mean the same)
Show the above address to the taxi organizer and he gets you a prepaid taxi for 400 to 500 INR.
The ride is about 20 min(taxi) to 40(bus). The temple is a little interior to reach by bus. The bus stops at the main road and have to walk around 7 to 10 min to reach the temple.

There are no other attractions in the surrounding locations except for Mudgoan. Mudgoan is a world in its own - very beautiful with old Portuguese buildings. The beach is a nice place to visit but crowded most of the time.