Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

In previous posts I talked about some of the movies I liked but since the post was about other things I didn’t go in much detail so this post is basically a brain dump of movies that I watched that I liked (or in some cases didn’t like) in no particular order.

Dhurandhar

Phenomenal movie, loved it. It is extremely violent but showcases the struggles of fighting against terrorism more realistically. It is being put down as propaganda but mostly by folks who seem to love putting down India in favor of other countries. Eagerly waiting for Part II.

The Running Man

Decent movie. It is the second attempt at adapting a Stephen King novel by the same name and was decent. I think the first from 1987 was better but this was good as well.

Tron: Ares

I think I am done with the Tron franchise. I couldn’t finish the movie as I found it boring. I am tired of the AI is taking over the world trope and this one was badly written one at that.

Thamma

Loved the movie. I really like horror comedies and all the movies in the Maddock Horror Universe (Stree,Stree 2, Bhediya, Munjya) are fantastic. It is a take on ‘Betaal’ (Vampires) with an Indian twist. The next iteration is going to be really interesting as this set the scene for for interesting crossover stories.

Lokah: Chapter 1 – Chandra

In the past few years I am seeing a move to tell more stories based on History or Mythology or SciFi/Fantasy especially in the South Indian Movie scene and I love it. Lokah is a Malayalam movie about Vampires and other supernatural creatures and how an ordinary person gets involved in it due to a girl he likes. It is the first movie in a expansive universe.

Mirai

Mirai is a Telugu fantasy superhero movie that I really liked. The part about Emperor Ashoka possessing super human (almost god like) power was a bit weird and didn’t make sense to me (It is told in the first few mins of the movie so not a spoiler). It mixed in mythology and superhero story telling quite well and there is a sequel in works.

Fantastic Four: First Steps

Decent movie, and a good setup for the next few movies relaunching/rebooting the Fantastic 4 movies. Plot wise it was a bit thin but way better than the last attempt of a reboot.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Boring movie, couldn’t finish watching it (Tried watching it twice but didn’t finish). Story didn’t click with me so stopped partway.

404 Run Run

This is a Thai horror comedy movie about a real estate swindler, Nakrob, who tries to turn a haunted, abandoned hotel into a luxury scam but is thwarted by the ghost of its original owner. It is a fun watch with some good scares and comedy.

I was going to talk about TV series that I liked/didn’t like enough to mention them here but the post is already long enough so will probably do a separate post for that along with another one for books.

– Suramya

I read a lot and am a fast reader so folks are usually quite surprised by how many books I read every year, but today I was surprised instead as I read this toot by Project Gutenberg:

A Man Read 3,599 Books Over 60 Years, and Now His Family Has Shared the Entire List Online
One page of Dan’s list of books

3599 sounds like a very high number. As I have been tracking every book I have read since 26th Nov 2007 I went and checked the list to see how I match up to Dan. In the past ~18 years that I have been logging every book that I read: I have read 3827 books!! Assuming I read the same number of books every year since I started reading novels at the age of ~9 years that would translate to ~7200 books read over the years. Filtering by unique books read, it comes to 2781 books.

As opposed to Dan, my list of books read is in the form of an excel file that notes the name of the book, author and date read. I could share the list online if folks are interested so see the stuff I read. BTW, the books in the count above are novels (fiction), they don’t contain any of the technical or programming books that I have read over the years. (Or any of the comics/graphic novels). It will be interesting to get a count of the no of books when I reach the age of 60, if I remember then I will make sure to post about it when I get there.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later (once I finish this book I am reading 😉 )

– Suramya

Today was Rakhi and I have a lot of sisters so end up with a ton of Rakhi’s being tied on my hand. Rakhi (Raksha Bandhan) is a Hindu festival where sisters tie a talisman or amulet called the rakhi around the wrists of their brothers who symbolically protect them and receive a gift in return. The sisters do a Tilak, tie the Rakhi and then give a piece of sweet. My sisters don’t know how to give just a piece of sweet so I usually have a full laddu/other sweets (usually quite large) stuffed in my mouth for every Rakhi being tied.

This year, Surabhi demanded “Get Dairy Milk Chocolates, a lot of them. No a ton of them for me” for Rakhi, then a few hours later I got a call from Sara (my niece) that she also wanted lots and lots of chocolates when she came over today. So being the nice brother & mama I am, I went to the local shop and bought every single Dairy milk chocolate they had and arranged it for Surabhi & Sara (See below). I got over 60 chocolates for the two of them 😉

Surabhi with her treasure of chocolates

I naively thought that they would take only some of the chocolates home and leave the rest at my place so that everytime they visit they can have a few. Instead they took the entire thing with them… Hopefully they won’t eat it all in one day.

This year’s Rakhi’s

Group pic of all of us who were there in person

I also wanted to do something different and created a shot video of my Rakhi celebrations from 1985 onwards (before that Surabhi was too young to tie the rakhi) to date.

– Suramya

I love books and I read a lot. Which means I buy a lot of books (physical books) as well. Last month I was in the US for a few weeks for work and Surabhi’s graduation and I ended up buying a few books 😉

My latest book purchases last month

In my defense, I was left unsupervised in a bookstore. The only reason I didn’t buy more books is that I was concerned that I might not have enough space in my suitcases for them.

– Suramya

Jani’s cousin got married last week in Kanyakumari (which is the southernmost tip of India) and Jani flew there on Saturday (25th Jan) for the event. Since I couldn’t take the whole week off I got there later by driving down from Bangalore to Kanyakumari. (Basically it was an excuse to do a solo road trip).

In total I drove 1640 kms in 4 days with ~22 hours of driving in total over 4 days. I started from Bangalore at 6:15am on Wednesday and reached the venue at ~5:30pm. The road was well maintained throughout as I took NH-44 most of the way. There is construction ongoing in places for flyovers which required minor detours/bad roads but other than that I could consistently drive at 100 without having to worry about random obstructions. This was the first trip where I drove for such a long time alone and before I started I was a little worried that I would get bored on the way but once I started it was really zen to just listen to music and drive.

One annoying aspect of the trip was Google Maps. It used to be really good but slowly Google has been removing functionality from the app and that gets annoying. Cory Doctorow calls this process Enshittification and this was a prime example of it. Earlier when you searched for directions between two points the app would allow you to drag and change the route. In addition it would also show all routes we could take everytime but now it will randomly select a path without the option to change or even see how long other routes would take. This time Google decided for some reason that NH-44 was closed for all traffic and kept insisting I take another route that would add ~3-4 hours to the travel time. As first I was able to force it to show the NH-44 path by putting the phone in Airplane mode before asking for directions (I had downloaded the maps locally) but even that stopped working after a while. Thankfully by then I was on NH-44 only so I just ignored the instructions to turn off into random directions and forced the map to update. Not a super critical issue in this instance because it was a straight route and I knew the way but could have been a big issue if I was going to a new place. I think I am going to explore openmaps in the near future to see if they give a better experience.

Jani and me at the Engagement

Jani and me posing in Traditional clothes

I reached Kanyakumari just in time to go change and head out to the Engagement which was a simple event. Usually I end up wearing suit’s for weddings but this time I wanted to wear more traditional clothes so I wore a Kurta instead of Jeans which had an added benefit of being a lot more cooler & comfortable than a suit. I was pretty zonked out during the event as it was in Tamil but still managed to stay awake for all of it.

The wedding party in pure white

The next day was an early start for the actual wedding. It was an interesting experience since it was the first Christian wedding I attended. My expectations were based on what I have seen in the movies but as both bride and groom are Pentecostal Christians the wedding was quite different than what I was expecting. It was an extremely simple wedding with no jewellery or bright color clothes. In-fact the entire wedding party was dressed in White on the day of the wedding. I had initially planned to wear a Sherwani for the wedding but decided to wear a golden kurta instead as it was just too hot to wear a Sherwani. Even then I was one of the few spots of color in the wedding.

Wedding selfie with cousins, niece and grand-daughter

After the wedding during which they didn’t allow any photos to be taken we all changed to more casual clothes and then drove from the venue to Tuticorin which is where the boy’s side of the family is based. We ended up starting quite late due to the various events/ceremonies and reached Tuticorin really late night after 11pm. After another photoshoot I went and crashed while the rest of the folks stayed up really late to chat and hang out.

Posing in traditional Vesti & shirt combo

Next morning we had a relaxed start of the day as the reception was scheduled for 11am. For this event I wore a traditional vesti and short combination. We had planned this as a surprise for the rest of the family. I was a bit worried that the Vesti would fall off but the new versions have velcro so it was safe and I didn’t flash anyone 🙂 . Funnily enough I was the only one wearing a vesti because for the rest of the folks it was daily-wear so they all were wearing suit-tie combo while I was in a Vesti. I think I was a lot more comfortable because a vesti is as per the local climate and quite well ventilated. I was feeling sorry for the folks in full suits.

Group pic on the way to the reception

After lunch and getting our pics taken we and Jani’s cousins decided to step out for a bit because by then it was just folks coming on stage for pics with the couple and that got boring after a while. Thankfully for the reception folks were dressed in colors other than white. The beach was nice but I couldn’t go in the water as I still had to go back to the reception afterwards. We spent about a hour at the beach and then headed back to the event by which time the newly weds were more than ready to head back home.

Jani and me at the Beach

We dropped them at home and changed into more comfortable clothes. At this time all the functions were done so a few of us stepped out for a bit of shopping followed by dinner. Post dinner I again crashed early because I had an early start planned while Jani hung out with the rest of the family.

The next day started really early and I left by 6:15am which was a good thing as I avoided most of the inner city traffic. The drive back was uneventful and I reached home by 3:10pm which was a pretty good time and had lunch after which I crashed and only woke up the next day morning.

– Suramya

Diwali is one of the biggest festivals in India, it symbolizes the spiritual victory of Dharma over Adharma, light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance. This year interestingly it fell on Oct 31st when Halloween is celebrated in a lot of the western countries, which made it an interesting day since that is the day when it is said that the barrier between the unseen world (spirit world) & our world is the thinnest and when the darkness is the strongest. Plus it was a bit jarring to see kids in Halloween costumes in the middle of Diwali pictures 🙂

We always go to Delhi whenever possible for Diwali as that is the one festival we celebrate at home with parents. In fact in the past 43 years I have only celebrated it 8 times without going to parents place and that was when I was in the US and it was not feasible to fly home for it as it was in the middle of the semester plus ridiculously expensive as well. I flew to Delhi with Mom on 26th so that I could spend some time with dad. I usually take 2 days off for Diwali and did the same this year as well. Luckily for us the day after Diwali was a Karnataka state holiday so I ended up getting 3 days off (plus 2 days for the weekend), I did WFH for the remaining two days.

Nothing beats spending time with family, but the Delhi pollution is painful. Before folks start blaming the Diwali crackers please note that I arrived in Delhi a week before Diwali and the air quality was so bad that I had the air purifier running 24×7 in my room and was taking Allegra every day for my allergies. But it is easier to blame cracker bursting instead of actually solving the root cause of the problem.

Due to work commitments Jani flew in on the 30th late night, her flight arrived on time but her luggage took over 1 1/2 hours to arrive. Apparently they sent it to the wrong terminal and it took a while to figure out what happened before they could sort things out. Once the luggage arrived we went back home and compared to Bangalore it is an amazing experience to drive a car in Delhi/Noida. The roads are wide and well maintained, due to this even when a car breaks down there is enough space for the others to continue on the way. Compare this to Bangalore where a lot of the roads are barely 1 1/2 times the width of a car so in case of a breakdown you are stuck there for the foreseeable future and that doesn’t even take into consideration the constant flooding of the roads here.

Diwali Havan

Once we reached home, we woke up dad so that we could give all the stuff Jani had got for them (and for me 🙂 ) which was quite fun. The next day we all woke up early (for me anyways) so that we could do the Havan to bless the house and all of humanity with health, wealth and happiness. An interesting aspect of Hinduism is that there is no one right way to do things, so different communities and even families have their own rituals for Diwali. For us it is an Havan in the morning and then Lakshmi puja in the evening. After the Havan since the house was filled with smoke (more than outside) we all sat in the garden and just relaxed for a few hours enjoying time spent with each other.

Jani filling the Diya’s with Oil while Dad relaxes by watching TV

Lighting the first Diya

In the evening we all got ready before dark so that we could do Lakshmi Puja. I have written about why we worship Lakshmi on the day instead of worshiping Lord Rama as Diwali started as a celebration for Lord Rama returning to Ayodhya after 14 years of Vanvas (Forest living) after defeating Ravan who was the demon king of Lanka and symbolized darkness so I am not going to repeat it again here but I do encourage you to go and read about it (scroll down to the bottom of the post).

Pic of the lit Diyas

Lakshmi Puja

The Lakshmi puja does require a bit of prep work, to fill all the Diya’s with oil and arrange them in proper order. Once that is done the Diya’s are lit and we do a short prayer before taking the lit Diya’s and putting them all around the house and outside. The idea is to light the entire house and avoid any dark rooms/areas.

Family photo outside the house with the decoration and lighting

Family photo in front of the house

Obligatory pic with the Frogs 🙂

This year because Jani likes bursting crackers (Even I do, but am severely allergic to the smoke) we got crackers (fireworks) and I burst crackers on Diwali after over 25 years. We hadn’t gotten much but still spent a good hour interacting with the neighbours and having a lot of fun. After we got done with bursting them me and Jani took a drive around the sector to admire the amazing decorations and lighting that folks had put up for Diwali. After that we called it a day and went back home to crash for the night.

Jani Bursting fireworks

Jani Bursting fireworks

Me bursting fireworks after 25 years

Love this pic because of the composition

The remaining days after Diwali I basically just chilled at home, not going anywhere and spending time with family.

In all it was a fun trip and I look forward to doing it again next year.

– Suramya