Wednesday, February 4, 2009

"mangalore pub incident" just an assault or a wake up call

its been a week or so since the pub incident has occurred and i must say this incident is blown truly out of proportion. the media on one hand has been glorifying the videos of the assault time and again crying foul over the government and its inability to tackle the situation the government on the other hand doing not enough justice to the victims and involved in more of a blame game taking the whole issue somewhere else.

firstly an organisation like sri rama sene must have been banned mercilessly which has taken a law into the hand literally assaulted people in way thats even hard to think off, it is nothin but just a gunda sene with a set of violent people with no human values i do not think this sene as of now is anything more than that. we've been seeing a lot of organisations like the kannada rakshana vedike,ABVP, and other pro kannada organisations etc which have shown tolerance in their protests to some extent even though they have sometime resorted to violence at some point of time however the rama sene has taken law totally into their hands in the worst possible way. i feel its our apathy that they use our sacred hindu god Rama to name their organisation. i do not know who built this sene and with what ideologies and goals was this sene formed , but however this incident has totally tarnished its image and it has completely gone into wrong hands. but i still see light for the sri rama sene as now it has strung into popularity , if it is to really make use of this opportunity then it must convert this popularity into positive energy by taking up its issues in a peace full manner . however those people involved in the pub incident have to stringently punished .

now looking at the pub culture and how it is growing at an alarming rate. bangalore may have already earned the tag of being the pub capital of India, other cities like mangalore etc may have started catching up. but is this tag something that we really require or to be proud off ,has anyone bothered to find out how many young boys and girls frequent these pubs or what impact does these pubs have on them. do we really require this pub culture in these huge numbers of them all over our places . isn't this culture purely aping the west , do we need to embrace it in such a way as it is happening now. often we see people say they work hard whole of the week so they frequent pubs in the weekend to unwind and relax but does the same explanation hold good for young boys and girls going to colleges i think definitely no. so its time we sit back and look what is really happening in these pubs and think about regulating the age of people going these pubs.

ultimately one must agree that pubs are definitely not any sort of a boon to our society however it is upto the people who visit them and indulge in drinking or smoking inside these pubs as it is the question of human freedom but at least government should definitely regulate by bringing upon a law for age bar to the entry into these pubs .lastly media especially the TV has not been fair in airing these violence videos time and again on air rather they should take the real issues and fight with the government airing these videos only creates more pain in the victims and anger among the public .

the trip to thiruvananthapuram

this jan 2009 we'd been to kerala . i would'nt exactly call it a trip cos its more of a pilgrimage, less of a trip . our destination being the ananthapadmanaba temple in thiruvanathapuram. so we started our journey beginning 28th jan night from Bangalore on the ever crowded kanyakumari express . since we had our tickets reserved there werein for no hassles the journey was smooth . what really caught upon my attention was the completely electrified rail routes from bangalore and untill kanyakumari . this is something i had never expected and considering the fact that most rail routes within karnataka mostly run on diesel engines i felt have our state been left out in getting the proper rail infrastructure .

the good thing about electric trains were they made less noise, drove much faster, they had uniform torque and most importantly were pollution free. anyways moving on the night was smooth, i had a good sleep(apart from one incident which goes censored) and woke up at about 4 AM in the morning to enjoy some fresh air standing by the door, however i couldn hold on standing for long as it was very chilling. the one thing about this train was even though its destination was kanyakumari in tamil nadu it largely covered most of kerala in its journey ,even crossed andhrapradesh on the way.

soon the sun was up and people started flowing into our reserved compartments with open tickets they were mostly students and office goers this did'nt matter too much because train was mostly empty by then an there was regular rotation of people getting down and flowing in. our destination was reached by 3.45 a perfect half an hour late which was very much upholding our railway tradition.

i had to negotiate my grandparents across the stairs which was a lil difficult for them considering that my grandfather hadnt eaten anythin that whole day travelling, he's a very Orthodox man doesnt eat food without bathing anyways that's his choice on our part we had packed enough to have during the journey and so we were decently full. the next task was too search a room in the city which i was lot worried about anyways we somehow managed to strike a economic deal in a hotel close to the station and the rooms very very clean and looked good.

then it was bath time and we all had bath and got ourselves ready for the ananthapadmanaba temple by 5 o clock evening we had the darshan and managed to get back to the rooms by 8.30 .the thing about the temple was absolutely no entry without dhoti and we weren allowed to take inside any mobile or camera, which i felt was a lil harsh.

talking about the temple is some thin i really would love to , the temple complex is huge i happen to hear that it was the largest temple in kerala , the architecture , the carvings, the gopura were magnificent. the deity in the sanctum sanatorium again was very pleasing to see .lord vishnu in sleeping position in the name of anantha padmanaba. i was very satisfied by the way the preists conducted themsleves considering what we usually see in some temples about they being only after our dakshina rather than performing the pooja with all fearfulness.


the next day we left room by 2.30 am in the morning again for the same temple and our puja's were finished by 6 and so therefore we had the whole day to roam about thiruvananthapuram.
leaving no opportunity un seized we hired a qualis for the city sight seeing for which we spent 1400 all inclusives. some of the places we then saw were atkul devi temple which happens to be called shabarimala of women, then we went to the kovalam beach, here i have to mention about the leela kovalam hotel to its adjacent this was somethin like a masterpiece of pleasure. from what i could see the hotel looked splendid.

carrying on we then went to sangamukham beach which is right opposite to the trivendrum international airport, however the link roads to the airport appeared to be of a very sub standard quality some kind of a galli road if i can say then our next destination was Veli village park which had a nice water body right adjacent to the sea . we tried our hands on boating however we gave up the idea after knowing that the prices were too costly. then further moving we then went to the city museum and park, visited the zoo, i would rate the zoo very average it hardly had any animals and it lacked maintanence however the garden looked attractive

we came out of the garden and the driver drove us back to out lodge and there it was the end of our trip . we packed our luggage and boarded the trivendrum-chennai super fast express we had a nice tight sleep considering all of us were tired.
we got down at salem from where we initially planned to take a bus to bangalore however to our luck we found a passenger train to bangalore which was to leave to bangalore almost ready to depart we quickly climbed on to this train and reached bangalore by 10.30 am. so that was the end of our kerala trip.