2008 - Looking back - II

Events/Experiences
. The year began with a trip to the temple of our deity in Sholingar and later to one of greatest temples in India - Tirupathi. While Sholingar was a physically intense experience as always - you have to climb almost 2000 steps in all - , Tirupathi was a different experience. We experienced enormous crowds, took part in a kalyanotsavam, had a footboard ride with my dad to a nearby place and overall enjoyed the trip.
Sholingar




Tirupathi:


. IPL fever gripped the country in the month of February and I was also thrilled to see the IPL live, in person.

. Travel and friendship took a giant leap this year. I became free at work for a while and we conveniently arranged for a north India trip, in the pretext of attending our friend's marriage in Patna. The trip was amazing.. From long train journeys to exploring the attractions of Delhi to roaming the streets of Delhi on foot and shopping for goodies to traveling in the Delhi metro, Delhi showed us why it's the capital of India. In Agra, our first view of the Taj was breathtaking. One has to see it in person to realise why it is given adjectives like PURE, DIVINE, BEAUTIFUL and so on. The first sight of the Taj justified all those adjectives. The trip also bonded our friendship strongly and we realised that college friendship has certainly changed, after 3 years of corporate life. The trip also brought out the accountant it me :)

Raju's marriage and North India Trip

The north India trip wasn't the end of my travel. I also travelled to Hyderabad and good ol Bangalore on official purpose. It would have been nice if I had stayed a little longer in Hyd. Bangalore was......




. Bangalore was a pleasant experience. I made new friends and also caught up with my old friends working in Bangalore. Even watched back to back films in PVR. Most of all, I discovered a lost part of me and did things I also wanted to do - like the 8 queens and 21 card trick puzzles. I think the discovery was basically due to very little travel (relatively) and because of near-zero distractions. Towards the end of the year, that part of me went missing :(







. Diwali was the biggest festival of the year, as always. We had loads of fun, burst crackers (more of fancy stuff this year) like never before and caught up with old friends from college.



. The year also showed us that mother nature is above all. We had rain water coming into our house, we rescued two enormously cute kittens from the clutches of death and felt gifted to having rescued them. They gave us company during the zero-electricity days :)








. Work went well this year with good technological scope. Finally got a chance to put jquery to use at work in the JavaScript area, also worked on java as usual and towards the end learnt a couple of bpm tools - Intalio and Tibco. Also completed the evasive SCJP exam for java 5 and was glad to learn and appreciate the new features of java 5, though I believe I won't be using java 5 or higher anytime soon in my current line of work :p
. Looking forward to 09, the year holds a lot of promise at work. Personally, it is a watershed and a very important year.
Wishing you all a happy and prosperous new year 2009. Meow!