English Premier League 16/17 Kick Off

The English Premier League, formerly known as Barclay's Premiere League kicked off two weeks ago.

Two rounds have gone by and 36 more to go. Looking at the results if anyone had a doubt that EPL is the most exciting league in the world, those doubts have been quashed. On the first day, in fact the first match, a newly promoted side beat the champions from last season.

As though Leicester City winning the league in 2015/16 season wasn't a fairy tale enough, here they were beaten by a side whose manager quit during summer due to the apathy of the owners who are about to sell the club. And have absolutely done no transfer business leaving fans high and dry.

Hull repeated the feat by winning their second game  away to Swansea city. And there are talks of making the makeshift manger Mike Phelan as permanent.

The regular top clubs have made good starts to keep their hopes alive. Every manager worth their mettle agree that this league is open to about 7 to 9 teams for the top 4. No club is guaranteed any spot. However a majority of the pundits have pipped Manchester City to clinch the title, given their squad depth and manager

This season is exciting for another reason. The influx of foreign managers, some of them world class. Jurgen Klopp who joined Liverpool midway last season now has company of Jose Mourinho and Pep Gaurdiula at Manchester clubs along with Euro power house Italy's national coach Antonio Conte at Chelsea and many more.

Get in!

The Winged Democracy.

I would like to call the new age India as a winged democracy. If you are a regular on social media and if you observed the events that led to the famous 2014 general elections in India, you would know what I mean.

In one of the most one sided contest the BJP and its allies came to power with a landslide victory with BJP having an absolute majority on its own.

Apart from the astonishing numbers, what baffled me was the way the nation was divided on issues and ideology , and in this classification we could see the rise of two wings - the left of centre wing and the right wing.

Various synonyms were attached to each side and on twitter one could easily distinguish the division. The supporters of BJP and its ally's or as they were called the right wing took it upon themselves to be nationalists and patriots who wanted a Congress mukt Bharath (India free of congress rule).

The other wing - the left of centre liberals although not necessarily supporters of Congress had a unique trait amongst themselves. They were all skeptical of BJP's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi primarily due to his alleged role in the 2002 Gujarat riots and his highly hyped portrayal Gujarat model, wherein the reality therep spoke otherwise.

The right wing group also had some support from diverse sections of society be it the business leaders , cine artists or sports personalities. Who all pledged their allegiance to seeing Modi as a leader to take India forward. The other common trait amongst these groups were the disdain and utter dissatisfaction caused by the mis rule of the previous Congress government that also had way too many scams to their credit.

Name calling was another phenomenon that would take place during the flame wars online. Adarsh liberals , sickulars, anti nationals would be pit against adarsh sanghi, bhakts of the right wing.

This continued even after the elections, even a slight criticism of the Govt and you would be subject to an array of abuse by the so called bhakts. Chetan Bhagat recently gave an articulate description of this brigade with an article on TOI.

Whether you are an armchair pundit, a keyboard warrior. It's fun to be involved, because only then can we evolve 😀

How to be healthy in a country like India.

The health of the nation is determined based on the health of its people. One could put down a simple rule that by eating healthy food, and by performing regular exercises and avoiding stress altogether we can have a healthy lifestyle. For my country India, the above is desirable though not always feasible.

My country has diverse traditions and cultures and for those who dwell in cities, to have a mix of this multi-cultural setup is quite common. Let me begin with our food practices. Long gone are the days where we restricted our food habits to our exact region or community. Today we would have breakfast based on a cuisine  belonging to one part of the country, lunch from another and dinner could be still not even from our country but made with some influence of western or inter continental cuisine.

Most of our urban young population live and work in the big towns. This mostly involves a 9 to 5 job five or six days a week. Besides work we have enough social and family obligations to keep us busy over the weekend. Amidst all these, the idea of regular exercise don't fit into many of their daily routines. Due to industrial workplace and residential area bifurcation, most of us will have to commute long distances to reach our offices. Add to that the pollution caused by the vehicles during the journey. The high competitive market  means there is lot of pressure involved in getting our work done. All of these add up the stress one has to take day in day out to make the ends meet.

Hence for a country which has chaos built into its DNA the only way to stay healthy is to follow simple rules in life. I will describe them based on the categories food, exercise, stress.

Food: Now we will have to agree that in order to get the flavour in our food we tend to ignore the health quotient of the ingredients that we take while preparing it. My recommendation is as follows.

Always include green salads as part of your diet. It could be for your lunch or dinner. If the food we eat contains lot of proteins, then they tend to generate heat in the body. Cucumber and raw tomatoes are known as good agents to cool down our body after heavy intake of meat etc. Make sure we drink as much water as possible throughout the day to help the metabolism of our body. Another trick I picked up from attending wedding feasts is that, after having a heavy meal if we are to drink a glass of hot water or tea, it helps in dissolving lot of the fat that may have accumulated in our food pipe.

Another important tip I received from one of my college professor was that, however complex the food material is, if we chew them properly and allow it to disintegrate we are again aiding the digestive process to be completed quickly. As Indians, we do a common mistake by keeping our mouths open when eating mostly because we would be talking in between our eating. This allows air to get into our stomach and further delay the food from being digested.

Exercise: Do not add exercise as a task to your routine, instead build your routine around exercise. Let me explain what I meant here. If we are unable to dedicate regular time for workouts, make sure we do our daily activities in such a manner that we get all the exercises needed in a timely and natural order.

For example, make it a point that you will never depend on a lift again. Now if your office is located in 20th floor make sure you take the stairs for at least 4 to 5 floors daily. If you have to communicate some thing to a colleague ditch that phone or IM or email, make it a practice to head over to his or desk and talk about the matter in hand and then comeback and send an email for future reference of the discussion. Make sure you do not stock up a water bottle. Yes, every time you are thirsty head over to the pantry and have one glass at a time. And remember our food habits mean that we need to have lots and lots of water.

Take a cycle to the nearest store you want to visit. You will be cheating your mind into thinking you are doing your daily chore but in reality you are doing all you can in little amounts to ensure your body receives that adequate amount of exercise daily.

Stress: Now there is no easy solution for this problem. The modern lifestyle has been designed in such a way that we can never really avoid stress. We can still find our secrets to de stress if you we start noting down things that make us really happy. Is it spending time with our dear ones? Is it by watching our favorite movie show? Is it done by playing with our pets? Or is it done by engaging in any indoor or outdoor activities like games and sports etc.

From our ancient times we have been hearing about the saints and sages practising meditation to achieve moksha. Perhaps they had foreseen a country where its people would be leading a highly stress full life in future. Which is why by their teachings, learning yoga and practicing it has immense effect on our lives in current conditions.

Trip to Talcauveri, Coorg Karnataka

Following our trip to Golden Temple, before we returned to Bangalore we made a stop at Talcauveri near Bagamandala. It is about 40 KM from Madikeri, which is the capital of Coorg.

The drive to this place is along the Bhagamandala forest range. Also the roads are carved along side the hills hence you will find number of sharp turns on the route. It was almost like driving along the ghat section since the roads were narrower too. Though we did see sign boards about animals crossing the roads, as always we could seldom see any. Also most parts of the route had small villages within about 5 to 10 kms apart.

Once we reach Bhagamandala, there is T junction, one of which will take us to a town called Panathur bordering the state of Kerela. And the other 9  km uphill stretch taking us to to Talcauveri. The place gets it's name from the fact that this is the starting point of river Cauveri flowing in the states of Karnataka, Kerela and Tamil Nadu. Tala here means origin. Since Cauveri is considered as goddess for the people of this state there is a shrine surrounding the actual starting point.

Once we parked our car and moved towards the temple, we were asked to deposit our footwear as the place we were about to enter was considered holy. My friend Sadiq was wearing shorts, hence he was asked to wear a panche(lungi) to cover his exposed legs. He was not amused by this rule though. 

Apart from the shrine, where the devotees can offer prayers, there is very long and steep steps that will take us to a hilltop with a nice and scenic view of the surroundings. Under the hot sun with barefoot, taking these steps were a real challenge and it tested our stamina to the fullest. It took us approximately 15 to 20 minutes to complete the journey with multiple pit stops for catching breath.

Once we reached the top spot, all our weariness were gone after seeing the spectacle unfold in front of our eyes. Since it was almost noon time there were no clouds and we could see as far as the horizon went. It was also the time to take as much clicks as possible.

Trip to Golden Temple, Coorg, India

On the way to Madikeri, as we get closer to it, there is a place known a Kushalnagar. It's a small town largely known for the Tibetian settlements around this area. The most iconic landmark in this place is the Golden Temple monastery.

The temple itself is located about 2 km off the main road. As we take turns to reach the place, we will start seeing the monks of all ages with their attires along the streets. Once we reach the place we will find a shopping complex mainly run by Tibetans. They are mostly handicrafts and household decorative items. 

Once we made our purchases mainly a hat for Manjesh and head massager for Sadiq, we headed towards the temple's main entrance. It was late in the evening when we had reached the place. Almost about 5pm. We could find few shops inside the temple premises as well.

The most endearing sight for us were these little monks running around in their traditional attire. My friend Manjesh observed that, isn't it cruel that these young ones will have to spend rest of their lives doing what they are supposed to do to become monks themselves. I couldn't argue more as it was true that these young boys were oblivious to the world outside their monastery. 

We visited all the main temples and were in awe of the sculptures and mainly the large gold laden statues of the deities inside the main temple.

Few more clicks and we were off to Madikeri.

One day trip to Atlanta, Georgia, USA

After spending almost 70 days and nights of what is the coldest winter in Ohio in the past 20 years, I was looking forward to my trip back home to a much warmer India.

From Cleveland I reached Atlanta in the morning of 8th March to catch my flight to Paris before I get the connection to my final destination and home Bangalore. I had almost 8 hours of layover at the Atlanta terminal. I had planned to tour the city in my short time available before I flew out. I was desperate for some outdoor sight seeing because the two months I spent in Ohio were mostly indoors. 

I took the subway train from airport to downtown Atlanta. Believe me I had made no prior plans on list of places to see here. It was only on the subway train that I started searching the must see places online. I short listed 3 places a. Atlanta aquarium , b. CNN studio and c. The Cica cola factory.

From the information I collected online I could see that all of these places were in walking distance of each other. As soon as I stepped outside the train and walked towards the downtown area, I was in for a rather surprise and shock. It was almost 70•F ! Imagine coming from consistent 20s and 30•F of Ohio to this pleasant and warm weather. Trust it was a different feeling altogether to be able to walk freely without having to run to the nearest shelter for warmth. 

My first stop was the Inside CNN studio tour. The tour is for about 2 hours where the tour filicide walks us through the various broadcast related places and gives us a glimpse of how love news is broadcasted to millions of homes in America and abroad. The first thing I learnt was that Atlanta was the founding place and current headquarters of CNN in America. Almost 70% of the content we see on CNN daily is out of this studio. The next big base for CNN is out of New York City.

The guide showed us a live set where a program was about to come live in a few moments. We could hear the producer giving instructions and the go ahead. We were shown multiple screens, current screen which we see in our homes, the advertisements screen and finally the studio screen where the anchor was preparing to go live in few seconds. The guide explained how all these screens are mixed and placed together in a program format so that we get to see a seamless experience of watching live programs without interruptions.

The. Next stop of the studio tour was the reporter desk from where the news readers read the news. We were shown a camera which had a built in tele prompter placed in front of the desk. Now the interesting thing about live news is that they are hardly live! Almost all of the programs have a background preparation time of about 5 to 6 hours to get the script ready. The participants include the anchor , content writers and producers. While reading news the reporter will have a hard copy of the script as well as the assistance of the tele prompter. The tele prompter is tactically placed such that we would feel as though the anchor is making direct eye contact with the camera. The hard copy will be used if the prompter fails.

We were also shown how the weather update works. We get a feeling that the weather reporter is standing against a large screen and providing an update. But in reality, they would be standing against a complete all green screen and the real weather screen is mixed in a computer program and transferred to the live feed. The reporter will have a hidden prompter with indications and cue's for the report. The guide also demonstrated a typical Hollywood trick, where he draped a visitor in green and the person just vanished from the screen!

The final stop was the main control center where the news analyst scanning through all their possible sources to generate one thing - NEWS. They had on display all rival channels along with online sites of various news agencies etc. They use them to compare the information mostly.

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