Tag: Bharuch

  • Don 2

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    It was a quick decision made a little after we boarded the company bus heading to Bharuch. We would watch Don 2. The back rows of the cinema hall was booked and the cinema house had taken the opportunity to hike ticket prices. We got a middle row seats for 9.45 pm show. We managed a dosa before the show by way of something to eat. As the show began, we found more colleagues from work.

    Watching a movie here is an interesting experience. People are not inhibitted from whistling, passing comments loudly or clapping. Quite different from the sophisticated cinema goers to the multiplex in a city like Mumbai. But, here it’s sort of in a good way and it adds to the experience rather than subtract from it. I think if you watch a movie with opinionated Indians, you have to bear with some of their opinions as well.

    The movie itself, despite the reviews I heard was very good. It was awesome. The storyline kept rolling, there was an element of mystery involved and in the end, the jigsaw puzzle is solved for us. The camera work really added in keeping that element of mystery while trying to find out how the hero managed to pull it off at all. The director (I like Farhan Akthar’s movies and believe in the auteur theory of cinema) does do us a service by not trying to force song and dance sequences where they do not fit in. I enjoyed the car chases (though not up to Hollywood quality) and the action sequences in the filmas well. The only bit of criticism that I can offer for the movie was its lacklustre sound track and that there seem to coincidentally seem too many Indians in Germany.

  • South of the Border, West of the Sun

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    Title: South of the Border, West of the Sun

    Author: Haruki Murakami

    Translated: Philip Gabriel

    Publisher: Vintage International

    ISBN: 978-0-679-76739-8

    Pages: 213

    Source: K J Choksi Public Library, Bharuch

    Rating 4/5

    I first heard about Murakami’s name in 2008 while reading Hugh MacLeod’s blog, gapingvoid. He had written a book about his experience as a marathon runner called, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running“. I had looked for a book by him in libraries in Mumbai without any luck. So, it was really stunning to find this book in a library in Bharuch. I finished this book in three days flat.

    The story is simple. The changes in the man’s life are complex. The feelings of a man even more so. The man, Hajime’s feeling swings were almost similar to me although Hajime seems to be more lucky with the girls. It was interesting exploring these things myself and by myself. I do not think that these explorations bear sharing here.

    I do not know how different these books are in Japanesse, the original language it was written in but the English translation is pretty plain. Perhaps this is what I found beautiful in this book. It does not try to be really exquisite about everything and is a rather average telling throughout.

    It was a nice catch and an interesting self-brooding read. There are other Murakami books here as well and I hope I can get my hands on them soon.

  • The Gemenids

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    It’s stunning how two streaks across the sky can fill up your heart with so much joy! Standing in my balcony in the cold climes of Bharuch with mosquitoes buzzing around, that was what my heart felt – pure joy.

    Every December, the asteroid 3200 Phaeton causes the Gemenids. The meteor shower this year was thought to have been spoilt by the Moon light. This did not deter me from going out into the balcony at 1130 PM and look out at the sky. The sky was clear, the light from Bharuch was slightly obstructive to the viewing, the brightly lighted industries in the west, did not help matters either. I was able to see Orion clearly, though.

    As I stood there, brushing away mosquitoes on my neck and slightly shivering in the chilly December air, a meteor streaked right across the sky. It was the first meteor that I had spotted – ever, in my life! Another streaked past barely ten minutes later. Then, for a long time there was nothing.

    As the clock creaked past, 0030, I went back to bed, slightly disappointed that I did not see (missed, rather?) any more but happy to have sighted a meteor shower.

  • An Atlas of Impossible Longing – Anuradha Roy

    I read a few pages of the hardbound copy of this book every morning last week. On Saturday, I finished it in a marathon reading session. It was done. I had got back to the habit of reading books, again. I had crept away from the habit citing lack of books as the problem. Then I found a library – a public library on Facebook – in Bharuch.

    An Atlas of Impossible Longing is a book by Anuradha Roy. Her debut book. The story straddles several genres – reverse migration from cities, nostalgia, romance, loneliness, partition stories, a tale on generations of a family, and much more. It doesn’t work seriously towards fitting into any genre and this is what endeared me to this book at first. I read through this book in fits and starts, through early morning bus rides cutting across small villages that dot the road between Bharuch and Dahej. As industries rise up, I am reminded that it is time to close the book. It is for running this industry that the lead character in the first part of the book comes to a small town.

    As the story unfolds in the later two generations, it turns to romance and towards loneliness. These aspects take up more time of the central character. The story also moves from the very simple and the very practical to the very complicated and the very romantic. In a way, it traces the generational differences between the several Indian generations into the seventies and the eighties. It explores how as we get more and more crowded we become more and more lonely and yearn for company.

    These are two themes that I noticed developing through the length of the book. The author must be applauded for some very descriptive settings and for some new analogies. I would have prefered a paperback to a hard bound copy of the book. I also felt that the male characters weren’t as well-developed as the female leads. Something to work on, I guess.

    I now have a copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi in my hands.

  • To Mumbai and back

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    Diwali gave me my first occasion to return home from Bharuch. This is a relatively small route to travel but is perhaps the busiest. Being on the straight Mumbai-Delhi line via Ahmedabad means some pretty heavy rush on the train lines. Wait listed tickets and endless refresh button clicking ensued.

    The Bharuch (BH is the Indian Railway short code for Bharuch Junction) – Mumbai Central (BCT is the Indian Railways short code for Mumbai Central) journey was nice enough. Got on board at 2338 hrs and reached Dadar at 0415 the next day and reached home by about 20 minutes.

    I used IndiaRailInfo.com to get the time-table. The website is pretty accurate in this regard. I also found it had this volunteer group that did many interesting things around the website – reported train progress reports, guessed whether a waiting list ticket would get confirmed or not (it predicts this but does not claim accuracy) and provides a very basic interface. I first started using this website in January when Kirk was here. Slowly I began to notice some of the crowdsourcing features around this website. One more piece in India’s strange love story with its Railway network.

    IndiaRailInfo.com predicted that my ticket would be confirmed, however it did not and I returned from home by bus – a Neeta Volvo. I slept pretty well and reached Bharuch at 0430 hrs and walked the last mile home.

    As I type this, I am back in Bharuch and back to work.

  • Watching Snehaveedu in Bharuch

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    Yesterday being a Sunday, I took a long walk into the shopping hub of Bharuch. The walk took me about 40 minutes to cover.

    Bharuch has this wonderful collection of cows, buffaloes and donkeys that run around on the street that makes it a unique driving experience if nothing else. It also has quite a number of fountain soda spots for really cheap rates. The other exquisite feature of Bharuch is some of the wonderful mosques that dot the city.

    Bharuch has two multiplexes (multiple screen cinemas) – INOX and FAME. There are several single screen cinemas here as well, which going by the looks still run movies and seemed profitable. I went to FAME cinemas to watch a Malayalam movie, Snehaveedu.

    The movie was okay – a plain story unlike many of the movies that we see today. A very simple story told well. You can learn more or less about the storyline by reading the Wikipedia article linked above.

    This post is more about the experience than the movie. To give you some context, Bharuch is a town playing a Malayalam movie whereas all it plays are Hindi movies. It does not play English movies. The idea of watching a Malayalam movie here seemed surreal, to say the least. Lots of Malayalees from around the city dropped in. The other thing, which I have not yet written here about is the monthly Kerala meals served on the first day of the Malayalam calendar month. More on that, some other day, perhaps.

  • At Bharuch

    I usually look up the place I am going to – if not days in advance then at least while going there using a mobile web application. While reading up about Bharuch where I have been since October 6, 2011, I found little or no information. The geographical information (which I have taken recent interest in learning more about) about the place is lacking. The Wikipedia article on the town just keeps on repeating a similar set of facts and figures and is in need of copy editing and addition of a lot of information. Google Maps doesn’t do much better. While it has captured major town locations, it does not have road names for every road. In short, it is a mapper’s paradise.

    All of that said, my first experience of staying in any place other than Mumbai can be best defined with just one word – SLOW. Bharuch is a slow town. It is a small town. Although, it is a town that is growing at a frentic pace as the nearby Dahej SEZ project is building up. The landscape is changing – faster than the pace of life here. People seem to be only coming to terms with the change. Slowly, there are more people from outside Bharuch in Bharuch than people who are originally from Bharuch.

    It has been 2 weeks since I have been in this town. I have spent most of that time going to and fro to work and learning the ropes there. I am yet to go into town and explore it like it should. Mostly, it is the heat that stops you from wanting to go out anywhere after 9 AM in the morning. Then, it’s only after 4 PM that it is even worth considering going out. The constraints that this places means that I have not had time to explore this town.