Category: karnataka

The Jog Falls travel experience

Travelling to Jog Falls

As part of my previous post I have already written what it takes to go from Bangalore to Jog Falls. We stayed at Sagar in a hotel called Green Embassy, whose review I have given in another blog post. If you wish to know more about the hotel please click here.

Jog Falls tourist attraction

Bus journey from Sagar to Jog Falls is roughly around 25 km plus or minus and it is a treacherous route down the Mountain and up the Mountain again. Since it’s a waterfall you will need to go down the Mountain to some extent to see the falls from the top. There are lot of private buses that operate from areas like Sagar up to Jog Falls in a regular frequency.

The cost of the bus is roughly around 1 Rupee per kilometre so we ended up paying around 20 or 30 rupees for a ticket one way per person. What is more important to note is the time it takes to cover this distance and it is slightly on the higher side due to the terrain. It is quite common that you might feel a bit giddy and may even feel like puking.

Jog Falls pathway

The Jog Falls is a Majestic tourist attraction and has roughly around 1300-1400 steps all the way down. The steps themselves neatly laid out and it gets steeper by the flight as you reach down. It takes roughly about an hour to go down and between an hour and a half or two hours to come back up. We carried only a couple of bottles of water along with our bags down. It is highly recommended that you keep some food like biscuits or the likes while going down. The time when we went was in November and hence the water was pretty less in the falls itself. Like I said earlier in one of my posts this was more of a backpack trip and we had to do it in haste without rhyme or reason.

The best time to go would be between June to August during which time the thunderous falls are a sight to behold.

Safety along the stairs

There would always be a question what happens to you if you go alone all the way down or even with another person all the way down. Would there be somebody who would pickpocket you? Or rob you? Or mug you or even much worse. What is worse is that there are just two security guards at the bottom of the falls. These guys cannot help much and they are just there to control the crowds. Sometimes there could be a set of unruly people who just want to have fun. So far I have not heard of any mishap but there is a genuine risk of something happening. Going down is essentially at your own risk although it is not a very difficult thing and you do not hear incidents happening every other day.

Some things to take care of while going down

  • take a few bottles of water and something to eat like biscuits
  • preferably go between 9AM to 11AM or even earlier
  • as the sun rises it gets pretty difficult to come back up again
  • safety is at your own risk so be aware of your surroundings
  • the mobile signals are not available as you go down so be aware of that
  • preferably go with someone else or as a group of people
  • time your descent and ascent accordingly
  • while coming back up again take as much rest as you want wherever you want
  • do not stress yourself to climb up the stairs fast
  • ample time to come up give time for others to take rest but at the same time keep looking at your watch in order to come back in a reasonable time
  • the staircase USA open between 9AM in the morning and 6AM in the evening
  • if you are going during the monsoon, take an umbrella and use proper clothing like shoes/raincoats etc. 
  • It could also be cold during monsoons, so cover your ears and chest if you can

Food options at Jog Falls

The Options for eating food at Jog Falls are extremely Limited. So you need to be aware of this and plan accordingly. There are a few stores selling frozen paratha or chapati along with some ill made curry.

The shops also stock a lot of ice creams & beverages cold and hot. So you should be able to get your Coke or Fanta or Pepsi easily. Please avoid the rice items here as the rice is not well cooked. Additionally there is also a KSTDC hotel which is only slightly better than the shops around.

Still this restaurant has its own flaws. Not all of the items listed are available at all the times. And if you go somewhere in the afternoon most other items are not available.

The best solution is to pack your own food and take it along with you so that you have something tasty and something made by you that is more edible than the ones available there.

Options to stay near Jog Falls

The couple of hotels that I did notice which is very near to Jog Falls. One of them is the Gerusoppa Maurya by KSTDC. I also noticed Jungle Lodges and resorts nearby. Barring this your nearest best option would be to stay at Sagar or Shimoga.

The total time it took for us to visit Jog Falls and be back is a little more than half a day so you need to plan accordingly if you are going there. This was of course from Sagar so if you are staying at Shimoga it could take much more than that.

Even though it was November it was pretty humid and sweating all the time. The climb down and back up only makes it worse. If you are going between July and August and plan to go down the staircase, don’t forget to take a raincoat or an umbrella and still continue to take water and some food. This should help you to be hydrated as well as mitigate the sweating problem during rainy season.

Conclusion

The Jog Falls is a must visit for everybody at least once in their life. Be careful to choose a place nearby to Jog Falls for your stay. Take care to pack food and water while going down Jog Falls pathway. Try to avoid the food which is available there. Time your visit properly. It would also serve if you can read about Jog Falls and its history before going there to appreciate the place.

If you like this post and photos please consider sharing and leave your valuable comments for me in the comment section below.

The Green Embassy, Sagara – Why you must check out this hotel when you visit Jog Falls

Introduction

Green Embassy Hotel, Sagara

My cousin arrived from United States of America and I had a chance to decide to have a backpack trip with him. It was a short decision to make and I had to hurry to make the best use of the time I had with him. For over 40 years I’ve never visited Jog Falls and I was always wanting to go there to see what it felt like to stand in front of the Majestic waterfalls of Karnataka.
We had to quickly book a mode of transport to get us there & also had to book a hotel for our stay there. Besides this we also had to find ways of reaching Jog Falls, seeing place and getting back to Bangalore within a day.

Route map

Map from Bangalore to Jog Falls

The distance from Bangalore to Jog Falls is about 445 km and it roughly takes about anywhere between 7 to 8 hours to reach there. We had a few options to get there which included KSRTC, going by train or driving there.
I have given to many places already within India and I was kind of fed up of taking my car out for this journey. As one would expect getting train tickets is extremely difficult to go to this place since this route is always busy and many people book the tickets in advance. So that left me with only one another option which was KSRTC.
My cousin said he would take care of the booking for the KSRTC bus and my responsibility was to book the hotel in a place called Sagar which was close to Jog Falls. The train actually goes to a place called talguppa but it is a place which is a bit nondescript and has only a railway station there. Please bear in mind that this place does not have proper hotels or stay options although there are some homestays near by.
Your best option would be to go to Shimoga or Sagara. There are frequent buses from Sagar to Jog Falls and it would roughly take about an hour to reach there. Although Google Maps says that it’s about 38 to 40 minutes one must factor into the route the railway crossing as well as the drive Downhill and again a bit Uphill to reach Jog Falls. Given this consideration and some wait time at the bus stand in Sagar it is better to keep about an hour for your travel to reach there.
I have already written a blog post about the KSRTC bus booking service online which you can read more about here. For this blog post I will focus on the hotel that we stayed in which was called the green Embassy in Sagar.

Criteria for the hotel choices

One of the main criteria that I had for choosing a hotel was that it must be very near to the bus stand or railway station or both if possible. Not only that it also had to have a decent restaurant as well as should be available at a value for money price. After doing a bit of research I did find that the gerusoppa kstdc hotel at Jog Falls itself was booked completely for the weekend.
Also since it was pretty expensive I had to choose something more reasonable. This is where I came across green embassy hotel which I finally booked.

Distance

The green embassy hotel is about 4 minutes by drive and about 10 to 15 minutes by walk from the bus stand or railway station in Sagar. This actually ticked my requirement for having hotel nearby. For the uninitiated this hotel is not a four or five star hotel but a more reasonable hotel in the area. It has nearly about three to four floors with a decent amount of rooms.

Rooms

The rooms are surprisingly clean and had large Windows and curtains. The beds were large and neat and the room also had a writing table and the customary wardrobe in it. One of the most important things everybody Looks for while booking a hotel is how good the toilet is. I was pleasantly surprised with the toilet within the room. Again it was not of four or five star quality but then for what it was it offered a very neat Western commode a good large and neat wash basin, with all the toiletries kept beside it.

Toilets

The toilet also had a shower partition and the water was quite hot for a good satisfying shower. One of the problems I always have with hotels is the pressure from the shower. Sometimes the pressure is so low that the whole experience of having a good shower is lost. The green Embassy was good in that respect.

Restaurant

Breakfast was complementary along with the hotel cost per night but since we stayed only for the day we had to pay originally for the breakfast. The breakfast is not a generous spread, but rather a few items of the menu that the waiter will discuss with you. Based on what you like he will be able to make a the crispy dosa and serve you Idli and vada, besides offering a few other things like Hot and Cold beverages and a few other items.

There are two restaurants within the hotel one is called swadishta and the other is called garlic. One the first one is a pure vegetarian restaurant the second one is a combination of veg and non veg food. We preferred to have food in the vegetarian restaurant and hence could not get a chance to check out the garlic restaurant for the vegetarian choices there.
The restaurant itself was very pricey and for just a handful of items that we eat we ended up paying up to almost 500 rupees which was high in my opinion. Not to worry though because there are very good restaurants around the area just if you step out of the hotel. All these restaurants can be found between the hotel and the railway station as you take a walk. So if you are not in the mood for having pricey food within the hotel you can always step out for a walk to eat somewhere cheaper.
The food itself was good but it was not of the best quality that you get in other major towns. How it was still tasty and we liked it a lot.

Cost of stay

I had already pre negotiated my time of arrival with the hotel and the chicken itself was pretty smooth and not a major affair. Our room was already ready by the time we reached Sagar.
Typical Hotel costs in These areas can range between 2000 to 5000 rupees. Green Embassy was somewhere in between. The room rack rate was 2000 rupees and we got the room at about 2300 rupees without breakfast. With breakfast it would amount to about 2800 rupees which is slightly on the higher side for a place like Sagar.
I also ordered a couple of beverages using room service which cost about 78 rupees.

The good parts about the hotel

  • [ ] proximity to railway station and bus station by walk
  • [ ] very neat and clean
  • [ ] good toilets
  • [ ] decent breakfast
  • [ ] a large enough car park

The bad parts about the hotel

  • [ ] breakfast is a bit pricey
  • [ ] the TV has very minimal channels and to do very well with an attached set top box

Conclusion

The Green Embassy is a very reasonable hotel for a place like Sagar. Its proximity to the bus station and the railway station makes it all the more likeable.

The varieties of restaurants available should cater to most people who want some good. The neat rooms and a friendly reception plus a reasonable car park and front entrance make this hotel good to stay in.

If you’re going for short stay which does not involve breakfast you can negotiate the rates with the hotel upfront. The best way to get to Sagar would be by bus or by train. Driving there is pretty long distance and can make you tired.

If you like this post and you wish to visit Jog Falls please do share this with your friends. If you have any queries or comments type them in the comments box below.

The CET condurum

There has been a recent decision by the government of Karnataka to abolish the Common entrance exam for private colleges and also remove any cap on the maximum fees that can be charged by these private colleges. However to mitigate the possible consequences the government also states that there would be a governing committee or ombudsman to decide what fee the colleges can charge based upon their location, infrastructure, coaching and course (You can read the full news report here

Everyone who has studied in Karnataka for their entire life or atleast from high school would perhaps know how much of a game changer the CET exam was. Even during the early 90’s this exam was the most coveted exam which brought in a sense of academic discipline among both students from Karnataka and other states. Though one had the potential to clear the IInd PUC exam, that was no reason to say the same person could match up against the CET exam with similar potential.

Take my case in point. I am from the ICSE stream for high school. With an 86% and above in my Xth board exams, there was still a feeling in me that my state syllabus bretheren were much ahead of me in terms of sheer marks scored. After switching to the state syllabus for my pre-university college, the sheer amount of coaching I received from one of the most experienced teachers from Bright Academy and my equal willingess to put in the same hard work from my end saw me top my college and score close to the 20th rank in the entire state. While this was just half the story, the coaching for the CET exam was a challenge in itself owing to the fact that the exam was 2 months away and we had to learn up what mattered by putting in a year’s worth of hard work in two months.

It was not the question of whether someone cleared the CET or not. It was the question of whether someone had the right focus, the right aim and understood the challenge of time in front of us. More than the students, it was so challenging for the teacher to optimize the opportunity to bring out the best in students in the right amount of time – what we call smart studying/working rather than hard work today.

The CET itself was a mixed bag of luck for each student as it was an outright pressure which made everyone tense on the day of the exam. It was not about the technical complexity. It was about negative marking, it was about wasting time on the one hard question than on the 5 easy questions. It was about focus and hitting the target that mattered. As a person who was confident of getting a rank between 1 & 100, the day of the exam changed all that confidence in me to revise my guidance (!). Owing to the fact of twists appearing in the form of more questions from Ist PUC syllabus a span of 10 extra questions that were unexpected, changed the fate for me to now provide a new expectation of being numerically below the 500 rank mark.

A rank of 483 showed how much one could be precise about his performance. CET was about bringing the best to the forefront. It was a show of might. A show of dedication. A result of suspense. An atmosphere of tension. A feeling of euphoria. A nail biting finish of the counselling. A sinking feeling of the fact that an engieering or medical seat had been secured. A family union after the whole episode. A feeling of 12 years worth of hard work, and more specifically 5 real years of hard work showing results. A sense of pride of having achieved something for what the parents stood for. For having educated you with their sweat of hard work.

Cut to the present day situation. More and more private colleges mushrooming day after day. From 10 to 26 to perhaps a 100 or even more. The chaos was already in the making. And it only got cemented so well that the private colleges association now had more teeth to demand anything and everything from the government. The last nail in the coffin being fee structure control.

Coming to the government’s latest stand on grading colleges based on :

Location: So what the government seems to be saying is that colleges which are easily accessible score more? Now in today’s situation does it mean a college in Jalahalli which is accessible in 30 mins from byappanahalli scores more than a reputed college in Basavanagudi which takes 2 hours by bus to reach?

Infrastructure: Alright, makes sense. But how do you quantify what infrastructure means? Labs? Cabs? Cafeteria? Library? What exactly?

Courses: Again we seem to be treading the wrong path here. Is it the number of courses or the kind of courses? Are these going to be measured on how industry specific they are? How industry relevant they are in today’s situation? How much in tune they are with the way education is organized abroad?

Coaching: I’m not sure how to write about this or what to write about this. Roughly about 30% of the lecturers have no freaking idea what they are teaching. While the remaining 70% are really good, its impossible to grade a college on just the kind of teaching done given the attrition rate of the lecturers every single year.

Veerappa Moily’s soft protest against changing the CET regime is very legitimate. Not because he started it. Because of the kind of control it weilded and shaped today’s industry that you see in Bangalore today. The kind of organized education that it brought about for what Karnataka is famous for.

To me its not about the poor who will be marginalized. Its about the rich who would be made poorer. Arbitrary fee structure increase is the last kind of favour any college needs from the government to start growing into automous currency monsters. An engineering degree that costed 20000 bucks way back in 1995 is now costing about 6 lakh+ in 2013. while this rate increase justifies against inflation, imagine the next three years fee structure. Are you able to guess where this is leading to?

I am predicting a four fold increase in this cost. Upto 25 lakh for a payment seat. Notwithstanding the fact that management seats are being auctioned anywhere between half a crore to more than 1 crore in both the engineering and medical segments. Assuming one spends half a crore on an engineering seat it takes anywhere between 15-25 years of meticulous hard work and growth in the software industry to even get anywhere close to earning back that amount. Given the kind of industry irrelevant subjects on offer this money spent is not even going to be of any worth.

Of course the colleges want to invest more money by charging students higher fee to maintain some standards within themselves. But if you are with me in understanding how building bye-laws worked and the Akrama-Sakrama scheme, you would know that this situation under discussion is no different from growing into an academic racket with similar dimensions and irreversibility few years down the line.

By the way is anyone looking at the way the schools are mushrooming with their own fee structures without a proper ombudsman? Your guess is as good as mine.

While every country is striving to make education free until high school and bringing the focus back into developing individuals to a higher level of performance, our education system is weaning towards a dangerous path laden with high unaffordable fee structures which only promotes growth of those people with money. This will eventually widen not only the urban-rural gap, but now widen an already mushrooming urban-urban gap in the education system.

If a doctor pays up 1 crore to get a seat and doesnt study well, you can imagine the guarantee for the set of patients that go under his knife! Similarly if an engineer pays up half a crore and doesnt study well, you can imagine how relevant what he studied would be for the industry. Thankfully the industry lobby is different from the college lobby. They select candidates based on how relevant the candidate is. Not how much a college in which he studied has been graded by the government.

If not anything else this will only start making the industry more aware that they need to start looking at the merit in candidates rather than the grade of the college in which he studied (as given by the government) in future. Its about time the companies start looking at visiting all educational campuses irrespective of their industry or academic standing. In three years time, a meritorious candidate could be well studying in a college which hardly people know of, which is hardly accessible, but might have the right amount of coaching and a more relevant course offering.

Bye Bye UVCE, RV, BMS, PESIT & MS Ramaiah.

The new Nokia Lumia 900 review from The Verge website. Great phone, but software has to catch up a lot !!

 

The Verge put up a crisp review of the new Nokia Lumia 900 which was released by AT&T recently in the USA. One can compare this to the Samsung Galaxy Note in terms of dimensions. However this has a clear black display and not an AMOLED and the focus point about this phone is its industrial design in terms of hardware. Since microsoft uses lots of playing around with fonts for its menus, and not much of icons or pictures, the phone is definitely fast to use. However not many people would be comfortable with this mode of user interface and menus after seeing Apple and Android which would deter them from buying this phone. After the Nokia Lumia 800 dropped to 23000 from 30000, a straight 7000 jump in amount in India, it is clear that this is to make way for the next hardware beauty the Lumia 900. One can expect this to be priced at 30000 and further drop to about 25000 in coming months after launch.

What is left then is to see how people receive the windows software and how many more useful updates are provided by Microsoft in future. Hope you enjoyed the video. Do leave your comments and let us know if you will buy this phone or not?

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why you must not vote for BJP again?

Agreed we have seen resort politics before but those were not for dissidence. Those were to give better opportunities to MLAs in some other party other than the ruling party. Also, its always a known fact in politics that one could always be looking for an opportunity to knock the ruling party down by hook or crook.

But seriously what is missing in Indian politics is the urge to argue ethically, conduct business professionally, and work towards reaching consensus on correct matters and agree to disagree on wrong matters. In the past 65 years we have still not cultivated the art of agreeing to disagree.

Having said that, Yeddy’s brand of politics is all amusing, irritating, annoying and frustrating in one go. I still remember the time he cried on TV to a young girl who said she was waiting to see BJP rule in karnataka. He felt so overwhelmed that people had given him a majority mandate and that he would immediately put to use his expertise he has had in RSS into building a better governed state and city.

What has happened a couple of years after that episode is that Yeddy has continued crying for many things even a few of them which were denied to him. He continues to now slowly eat into the BJP base in Karnataka with his politicking with his higher ups and he is more of a naughty kid who needs to be in detention. The BJP must remove such people in a show of ethics and confidently approach another poll to teach the dissidents a lesson. Bringing caste and creed into the equation is only worsening things and the focus on development is completely lost.

Advani has done the right thing in letting Yeddy know that he will not be able to bail him out to be the chief minister of karnataka again. From land deals, to slow development of city and state in general, and for all the poor show that BJP did in the south, its only a matter of time before the congress rears its head again. Given the recent by election results where an independent candidate won, it only shows that the people are slowly fed up of the BJP for good. It is then only a matter of time before the BJP is decimated for all their wrong doings in the upcoming poll whenever that is.

The screw up of bio 2011, and other technical events has made the industry really unhappy about the current government. The industry has no more faith that they can repose in such a chief minister. The growth of karnataka is only going to take a backseat in the current year and more and more things are going to get mismanaged worse than ever.

Its time we boot our ex-cm out and show a strength of solidarity in putting together leaders who have vision, hope and work hard to realize the dream come true in the next decade. The next decade is one of very high importance and also competition where it matters the most for other states to pick up where karnataka left. If we do not have men of superior vision, and do not focus on what we do and work hard, we can see Karnataka lagging all the way in the next five years.

The phenomenon – part one

I always wanted to pen down this story, but time was at premium. It finally finds its way into this blog. This is not a story of a place. Its an article about the phenomenon called Koramangala and my gratitude for a chance to breathe, live and loathe it.

The year was 1983. But we were living in 1682. The mood wasn’t exactly one of jubilation but more of an urgency. An urgency to find a place which we could call our own, in anticipation of a family which would shortly burst at its seams. With many siblings of my father yet to be married, there was never a perfect time for this shift. Our then rented home 1682, in Rajajinagar had a reason to be vacated. With burgeoning rental demands, and for reasons beyond my comprehension when I was just six, and with pressure from everyone around, we had to vacate the place.

Koramangala was neither in the city, nor was a village. At best it wasn’t even lands that belonged to the rich and powerful Reddys those days. It was more of unexplored forest, which BDA decided to tame in the name of site allotments. My father had been allotted a site for five thousand rupees. Five thousand was like a current day fifty lakh figure to him with his rather abysmal salary levels and the last thing he could do was cough up this amount for the property. He had two choices – Koramangala and Indiranagar. While he could somehow locate the former, he was afraid to go to the latter area !! 🙂

After a lot of discussion and math crunching all the brothers decided to pitch in for the house so that my dad could enable the change in life. This in my opinion was the beginning and end of a joint family. The beginning was one of happiness and the seeds for the end were being sown not withstanding my oblivion about it.

The nearest  bus stop to Koramangala those days (80’s era) was can-you-believe-it Diary Circle which is a good 3-4 kms away. I would say its good for a heart patient as such, but for the good-for-nothing health freaks that we are, this was way too much. This also is the sole reason why my dad and grandpa are living/lived a healthy life. They walked this distance at least for a couple to three years before the phenomenon started happening. With just six houses for the entire eight blocks of Koramangala, this was nowhere near a phenomenon in the making.

From there what happened until now is the phenomenon.

Palace road widening, GIM investments and the impacts

The road widening hooligans are at it yet again. This time they are aiming to chop off full grown trees alongside the palace road from both cauvery theatre side as well as from TV tower side. Reason is they want to make it a 10-lane road leading to the already glorious (for the wrong reasons) airport. Of course Mr.Srikantadatta being from the royal lineage wants 40 crores per acre or per squarefeet – all this while the government is already mulling whether palace really belongs to him or not in the first place. The palace itself is earning crores of money for all kinds of events and some sundry income from few roadside meters chopped off is a feather in wadiyar’s money cap. Here it seems both the government and wadiyar are equally selfish to their own ends. Whether its road widening or underpass or flyover, in the name of infrastructure the government seems to be siphoning off funds here and there in mass scale. No wonder in the recent GIM, the government has sanctioned power projects alone to the tune of some 2 lac crore if i am not mistaken, and pat came the query from the high court asking for the details of such blanket approvals and what exactly were these projects. While industrialization of karnataka is not bad, mass approval of projects without any consulting agency or committee just by the chief minister is a certain invitation for trouble in the short future.

 

 

 

the Recommendation disease on linkedin

 

Most of you who use linked in would have definitely come across the raging recommendation disease. Note what I said just now. The issue is not with recommendation, but its actually with cross recommendation or the I-recommend-you-and-you-recommend-me-back syndrome. Here is an example from one of the people I have worked with which I did not expect.

Well, I think personally linkedin must ban this kind of cross recommendation even if it is genuine. This dilutes the very notion of a recommendation. I just dont understand what people think when they resort to this technique. Do they think every such cross recommendation would mean getting a job easily? In fact contrary to that notion these kind of cross recommendations actually dilute the perception about the two parties involved in such recommendations.

Any recommendation must be at actuals typically either from a leader, about the people who he worked with, or a genuine recommendation that an individual wants to provide about a person who according to him has leadership qualities that are beyond par for that role.

However this increasing trend of the recommendation disease is beginning to cast a doubt over the quality of linkedin and subsequently the people who are using it as well. With linkedin also tying up with twitter and perhaps facebook in someway, a real dilution of a professional network is only days away.

One can already notice the effects when linked in updates say things like – “… is reading a book on how to conquer the world”, “….is wondering about the next biggest technology and how it impacts his life” and so on.

Its about time linkedin also introduces an at actual feedback system where one can talk about what are the improvement areas that a person being recommended can concentrate upon. Since this would be chronological, people reading this can always judge how many years have elapsed since such a recommendation and whether the recommended person would have had a scope to effect such an actual improvement in his daily routines.

Seasons change, as Bengaluru embraces Summer

 

(image source: from here)

This February has seen some unusual temperature variations. Bengaluru was ultra chilly at 12-13 degrees C. Added to this were few virii in the air, and everyone were down with viral fevers, cough, sore throat and other typical Bengaluru syndrome.

My case was similar and trying out different modes of treatment did not help much. What really then helped was a shift to summer which I was eagerly awaiting. And change did happen. The second fornight of Februrary is bound to see the minimum temperatures hovering around 17-19 degree mark, while the maximum temperatures feel like May really at 32 degrees and above with very little humidity levels.

Whatever happened, has happened for the good, and atleast we have sunny mornings these days! 🙂
Time to welcome the summer and its showers to cool us down once in a while. Enjoy your summer and holidays if any!