A trek that tested our strength

Koldher

In past couple of years, since all of us got a bike / car and have started working somewhere, we have started enjoying luxurious treks with respect to food variety, taking vehicle till the very end of the road before we can start climbing up some fort. It has become very easy and time saving with a vehicle at our disposal and we can cover any forts at far distances, but every time, at some point we feel that we should now go to a real trek.

Ganesh Chaturdashi special trek to Ankai - Tankai

The Ganesh festival is one of the biggest festivals celebrated in India. There are crowds all over a city during the 10 days of the festival, which peaks in the last 2-3 days and all main roads in the city get closed for vehicles, to make some room for the crowd walking from one place to another to see the decorations made by various groups (Mandal). The highlight of the festival is the Ganpati Procession (Miravnuk) that takes place on the final day - Anant Chataurdashi.  So unless you want to see those decorations or want to see anything from traditional Dhol - Tasha Pathak in the procession to people dancing on the beats of rowdy hindi film songs, it is not the place for you.

Me and my friends have been going to see this procession since we were in school. We used to go on Laxmi Road at night around 8 - 9 pm, the main road from where all the groups take their Ganapati for immersion and witness the huge crowd gathered there just to be part of the whole festive atmosphere. Wherever you look around, be it the road, railings, footpath, balconies and any open space in the buildings on the road, there is crowd. We used to wait for the very well known and well respected Ganesh Mandal, Dagdusheth Halwai to arrive at the Laxmi road, which never missed its 6 am timing, and then only go back home.

Durg - Dhakoba

When we started planning for it, few of us had only one and a half day in hand where others had 2 full days, so we had to plan where we could visit one fort on first day and start back to Pune on the next morning, while others could continue to the second fort. That's why we decided to go to these forts since Durg is very small, actually a huge pile of big rocks rather than a fort. Dhakoba has quite a climb, as per few books and blogs it takes 2.5 hours to reach its top if climbed from the base village Amboli.

Cricket World Cup 2011

I used to watch one day matches with family when I was in school. But as me and my brother, Harshad grew up, he started watching cricket so much than before, I got fed up of it and didnt watch it much since then. It's been almost 12 years since I remember watching any one day match from start to end.

This year when world cup advertisements started appearing on tv and radio, I was quite unhappy with the thought of cricket being watched in our house at all times and about hearing only cricket talks everywhere around. Obviously I did not watch any match, except few glimpses while passing from tv room..