Kalsubai Reloaded !!!
( a series of unexpected events)

This is my second posting on the mother of all treks to sahyadris, the last one being very brief was really not a justice to it so thought of giving it a second shot both by visiting it again and describing whether the green giant has changed or is still the same (fairy tale:P).
Out of options of Naneghat and Kalsubai to choose from it was obvious where to go as naneghat was visited just a month back.
I shall not get philosophical about the ghats anymore like earlier postings and come straight to the topic. We started at 4:00 am from IIT to board a train at kanjur .... though thought that a walk till railway station would be a good warm up but there were extra lucky people .... all of them having managed a rick. Train arrived as per time ...us having arrived at the station much before contrary to the IIT standards and there we were in the local with half the seats vacant(try and imagine one). We still managed floor near one of the doors... intros, PJs, dumbC and a game on checking pervert standards(courtesy:Sushrut) of ppl spiced the atmosphere. Kasara arrived in no time(2hrs) and we were there on the station with 2 more hours to go. Hired 2 jeeps for 20 ppl to the base village "bari". The base was a typical rural gaon with students going to school wearing gandhi topis and thus started the ascent to the seemingly unreachable heights.
Some of us were excessively prepared so had to compromise on bag weights ;) ... having covered a patch of the forest and little ascent started the first signs of "I guess this is what the top would also be like so i shall rest... so the rest should move". Little motivation from us(me and shintre during the ascent) was more than enough to overcome this intial lethargy and once having started there was no looking back.
Three dangling iron ladders and one chain with little rock climbing were good challenges and flavoured the ascent. Reaching the top one could find an old well and a small temple of "KALSUBAI" after whose name the peak is named.
The scenery was breathtaking .... thick, moist, white clouds send a chill down the spine and the peak being the tallest.... one can look down at the other peaks and count them. After having some food we started the descent.
The descent was pretty enjoyable too, it had started raining and ppl came down sliding though the muddy paths relieving their legs at the cost of their butts. Sliding, kicking and rolling everyone managed to come down ..... those who came early had good time playing in the cold streams. The jeeps took us to the Bhandardara dam which in itself was huge ... though we didnt have the permissions to go inside, a good part of it was visible from outside.... from there we left for railway head at Kasara.

This is where events took another twist. There was already a train waiting to leave in 10 minutes. Some of us were attending our nature calls (me and sanjeev), some booking the tickets (jangir and joe), some still outside(ani and ankur) and rest were on the platform. All of a sudden the train whistles, there is a confusion and people at the platform start boarding the train.... the train leaves with the rest(13 ppl) leaving 5 of us(me, jango , saswati, joe and sanjeev) on the platform and 2(ani and ankur) outside the station. 5 of us being unaware if them being out of the station assume them to be with the gang in the train rush and board an Express train that arrives at the same time hoping to catch up with the rest at kalyan(without the express train tickets !!) . While we were almost at kalyan we came to know that the 13 who had earlier left have come back to kasara and are coming by the next train that was 1 hour late(time taken to travel from kasara to kalyan is 1 hr). So we decide to leave and wait at kanjur for the gang and leave kalyan taking an empty local from there.
Having had enough of running we fall asleep and realise that kanjur had come after the train starts moving ... in a hurry all 5 of us jump off from the train. Sanjeev and joe decide to leave. Ankur calls up to inform us that we may leave as they would take an hour to come .... 3 of us decide we sould leave ....as i get up i realise something is missing .... something very dear and intimate .... I had forgotten my bag in the local!!!! ..... Cursing the heavens we ask saswati to leave and decide to go to the railway police and ask for help ...... As if all this was not enough we find the "thulla" crunching moongfali on liquor .... even worse he refuses to help and asks us to go to Ghatkopar saying that his office was a small and not good for any business ...... having heard too much from him and reaching my limits i trash him with all sorts of things we imagine about their attitude and that worthless people like him are the ones who ruin the image of the governance........ having realised this was too much for him we rcush out banging the door on him before he could retaliate ..... the results could have been unimaginable if we were still on the otherside of the door.
Still things decided against settling down and the auto which we hired from kanjur to IIT overtakes a nearby taxi wrongly and both of them get down at the edge of th road and in no time reach for eah others collars ...... thankfully the nearby ppl intervene and things were prevented from blowing up. We reach Insti and saswati having reached before joins us at H5 for dinner .... she had another set of wierd experiences with sick ppl offering lifts and stuff ..... All said and done we reach H5, have dinner and retire to sleep.

The trek was both a great outing aswell as a great learning experience for all. Hopefully in a few days all recover from the cramps they are experiencing.

The Gang:
Fifthies: Ani, ankur
Fourthies: Sushrut, Swati, Sai(me:D)
Thirdies: Jango, Shintre, Shiksha
Sophies: Sanjeev, Joe, Vedang, Vivek, Akshat, Saswati(MSc), Abhishek, Jyoti and vandana.
Freshies: Sanket, Anurag(nicknamed commando as he was the only person who crawled the trek unlike the rest ... and managed great stunts around 3 were ppl had to pull him up when he got stuck in a wierd position on a rock edge and the ladders)
Spl (Ex Research Fellow): Amruta Pathak

Nostalgia...
These are some of the arbit drawings made during the sophie times or even before.
The first pic is the one that i sketched initially and colored using photoshop... 'twas the first attempt at painting using the software.
The second is a Pokemon character names "Slizor" ... the spelling may be wrong!!! .... it was a poster color painted thing with little digital brightness and contrast modifications added later on after scanning. The cartoon series though is very kiddish. .. i like the way humble animals are modified to fit the wild imaginations of the creator by enhancing the features that usually go unnoticed... for eg. the big sharp eyes with exaggerated claws and robotic body.... simply awesome !!!!

Had a few more characters .... couldnt upload them ..... blogger didnt allow me :-|.

My first Digital Abstract !!

Abstract art is understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses shapes and colors in a non representational or subjective way. It is a form of art much different from the usual representational form where objects are drawn as they exist.
The one that i have tried above is actually a result of fiddling with a few blobs of paint and randomly smudging it using photoshop.

RAJMACHI!!!
This is one of the most wonderful treks I ever went for and also the one that I shall never forget as it was a day before mumbai recorded "the record" rainfall..... imagine a group of 30 students out for a trek just a day before their city was hit badly by the sudden cloudburst.
Well it all started by an idea to give a good head start to the coming semester and what could have been better than a trek to the mighty sahyadris during the awesome monsoon season it is blessed with. As a usual trek exercise some of us woke up at about 4:00 am in the morning and woke up the entire gang by 4:30 and we were all set for the ordeal.
The team was special in the sense that there were many who were trekking for the first time and that it was raining ;). The scenic beauty after the local train rips through kalyan was as usual spellbounding. Soon the ghats started emerging as giants dressed dark green challenging the mere mortals through the heights of the skies ... the whole experience was very exciting and evoked a thrill experienced never before. In about 2 hours we reached Karjat and now we had to take six seaters to the base village "Kondivade". While we were in the vehicle the driver warned us against going close to the river that was flowing nearby as it had already taken a life.
Rajmachi is connected to Lonavala through a pass and while ascending you can see the express trains digging into the tunnels and coming out time and again ..... We had an option to trek all the way to lonavla provided the constraints of enthu, time and energy permitted us.
So the actual trek started .... we managed a decent distance in to the green and soon a local village boy said he would guide us to the peak ..... Though we were enough in number and a small contribution from each of us could have earned him a fortune there were some who refused to budge and he had to accept a meagre amount to his utter dissatisfaction.... soon he realised that he desreved more and started demanding extra bucks .... his proposal was put down ... though he showed signs of frustration he was ignored and this led to his leading us to an unknown path and abandoning all there.... having realised our state a bit late we had to fight our way through dense bushes to make our own way to the correct path ..... thank god that we managed to find one..... so again we were all together geared to scale the heights though some skepticism started creeping in a few minds most of us were too determined to budge. The path lead us to a small village on the mountain where we had a light breakfast and from there one could see the pass to lonavla. A little more effort took us to the base of the RAJMACHI FORT which in itself was a beautiful piece of arcitecture and engineering.... given the time it belonged to it was difficult to imagine how people carried such heavy boulders all the way to this height, carve and engineer them to such preciseness to make an unpenetrable fort that still stands the lashes of the weather boldly after hundreds of years.
This was just the base of the fort and before we could proceed futher a dense cloud rising from below separated 3 of us from the entire crew and within no time we were separated from them all. As it was obvious that they would take the same path down we preferred to wait at the village. In some time the ppl arrived and we started the descent. This wasnt an easy task for one of us and we had to manage him in turns till we reached the base.
It started raining heavily when we were at the base and the small waterfalls turned in to strong currents ..... with chest high water we had to cut our path through them by making human chains ..... this was one hell of an experience ... ones that i always die for :D.
The return journey was very dead .... all were waiting to hit their beds .... the local dropped us at kanjurmarg ... me and some friends walked all the way to Harish's and had a dinner .... then walked all the way back to hostel.... and thus ended the awesome trek.
Newspaper headlines the other day read "Massive landslides during the heavy downpours ...... village kondivade among the worst hit by landslides in the area"!!!!

Time: Third year just the begining of the first semester.
Gang: H4 thirdies 2005-06