Nainital Travelogue

I was having a typical Friday, making plans for my weekend ahead, when all of a sudden, my uncle asked me to accompany him to Nainital. It was around 8 p.m. when he asked me, and he planned to leave at around 5 a.m.next morning. I had to finish a couple of deadlines and wasn’t ready to go anywhere. After being insisted I finally made my mood.

So we were ready at 6 a.m. the next morning. Our Innova Crysta came on time to pick us up. I had taken only milk before leaving. My uncle had prepared some sandwiches for the route, and we had also bought a few other eatables the previous night for the tiring 300+ km journey which was going to take 10 hrs+ time.

The early ride went nice. I was asleep most of the time. We stopped at a dhaba; which is a term used to describe roadside restaurants in India. The food was delicious, I loved it. Then we again started our journey.

When we reached the mountains, the boring long road trip became somewhat interesting. We opened the windows and let the fresh air in. It was so refreshing. Greenery seemed neverending, and hair started swaying due to the wind. Fast forward to the time when we were way above the plains, we spotted a small waterfall. A lot of tourists were already present there. I went near the waterfall, touched the clear water, washed my face with it, all my sleep vanished, and I felt so alive. Then I clicked a few pictures. At this moment I realised things were getting chilly. I wondered how cold Nainital would be as it was at a higher altitude than this place.

At around 4:30 p.m. we reached our destination. It was not exactly Nainital, it was about 20km ahead. The name of the place is Kainchi Dham. It has achieved recognition owing to the ashram of saint Neem Karoli Baba. Fun fact: Even Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were influenced by his thoughts and had visited the ashram. The ashram was very peaceful. People there seemed very helpful. I could even spot a few foreigners out there reciting bhajans. It was such a lively environment out there. Added to this the location was great. The scenic beauty around was mesmerising.

Even our hotel was very nice. Most of the furnishing was in wood. The rooms were wonderful. The staff was very welcoming. The food was lip smacking. Whether to consider it a boon or a bane, the place was in a no network zone. There was network actually, but our network service provider did not have any towers here. Also, the wifi at the hotel had some issues at that time. So we had to stay away from the rest of the world for a whole day.

Next day before leaving the place we once again visited the ashram and then headed towards Nainital at 10:30 a.m. We reached Nainital by noon. It was a 1.5 hr stop for us, and we decided to go boating. It actually turned out to be the best part of the trip. We rented a paddle boat for an hour. We started paddling. After some time it became tiring, but we had high spirits and so did not stop. The lake was clean. The view from the lake was heavenly. A cool breeze was flowing time and again and it was very delightful. I liked it when sprinkles of water came on board or when the waves hit our boat and made it tremble. The temperature was cool and ideal. I clicked a lot of pictures. It has become my favourite boating experience until now, and I would really love to enjoy it again.

We left Nainital at around 1 p.m. Our return was not that good. Lots of traffic jam and poor selection of a place to dine being significant reasons. In the I reached home at midnight. It really was a tiring end to such a wonderful experience.

I would like to end by a quote: “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” – Jack Kerouac

Scariest Story Of All Time

Clearly, that title is clickbait. Sorry to disappoint you, readers. About two months ago, I was in my communication skills class when we were given a task to write a story. The restriction on us was that we needed to start our story with a line pre-decided by the instructor. The start line was “I entered the tall gates of IIIT-D and”. As there was no restriction on genre, I thought why not write a ghost story :P. So let me introduce you all to my stupid horror story.

“I entered the tall gates of IIIT-D, and instantly I got fascinated by its infrastructure. However, I was also surprised to see old British architecture as I had expected modern architecture as cited by quora posts and certain other websites. Also, did I forget to mention that it was around 8 p.m. when I reached here? I hadn’t informed my parents about it as I was too eager to go and view the place I’ll have to survive in for four long years. Though our session was going to start the next morning, I desperately wanted to see the area and I knew my parents wouldn’t have allowed me.

Coming back to the time when I entered the gates, I saw no guards on duty. I thought they might have gone for a round. Then I heard the gates close behind me and I thought that may be due to the push by the wind. I wasn’t impressed by lighting in the college, there were many spots where no light entered. Then I went inside a building whose name I didn’t know. Inside I saw weird historical stuff like old paintings with spider webs all around and torn carpets. I wondered how ill-managed this place was. While exploring the area, I could hear weird noises. I started getting frightened. Then I saw a room at a distance and heard someone teaching maths. I didn’t seem to like the voice of the person teaching. But I was very keen to see him. When I opened the door, I saw a ghost teaching other ghosts. My heartbeat stopped, and I almost fainted. I ran outside as fast as I could.

In the end, I got outside, safe. I was really shocked to see a board which read IIIT–D -> Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology for the Dead. I fainted.”

Sorry to rush in the end, as the writeup was time bound. Do tell if you liked it and if it really was the Scariest Story of all Time. Also, tell if you want more story sessions with me :P.

Hackathon: Where miracles happen

This weekend I attended my first hackathon, and it was such a crazy experience that I felt it is worth sharing with you all. So all those who don’t know what this crazy sounding word means, a hackathon is an event where people come together and work on beautiful and different ideas and in the end give an output. The speciality of a hackathon is that it runs for around 48 hours straight (basically your weekend which you wanted to spend sleeping 😜).

The hackathon which I attended was just an intra-college one and was exclusively organized by our seniors to give us a basic idea about hackathons and so was only 12 hours long. However, these 12 hours were enough to generate interest in hackathons for me. It developed an obsession towards creating new things. The obsession which doesn’t let us sleep for so many hours until we achieve our goal, the one we’ve been working on for the whole weekend.

So coming back to my hackathon experience, I was awake from 9:15 a.m. on Friday and when I went back to sleep it was around 3:30 p.m. on Saturday. My hackathon was from 10 p.m. Friday night to 10 a.m. Saturday morning. After that, we had our presentation from around 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. where everyone showcased their products. Before the hackathon started my team started brainstorming for some ideas when one of my teammates shared his problem with us; whenever he watched a movie, he wanted to watch other films with similar plots if he liked it, but it was a real pain to search for one. So we finally decided to make a website to solve his problem.

10 p.m. had passed, and we were making mind maps, distributing work and searching for ways to implement our idea. On doing all this, we realized our project was doable, and we could do it before 12 hours. I tried to refrain myself from being complacent. Few hours passed, and it was around 1 a.m., and we were at a good pace. Everyone was working hard. Even my most notorious teammate was highly focussed at that time. Everyone seemed to be loving what they were doing. The environment was quite cheerful. But our respite was short lived. We had a lot of problems. Our frontend was ready, but we weren’t able to integrate it with the backend. Even our backend had lots of issues.

Hackathon also makes us discover different aspects of human emotions. From everyone being cheerful at the start, by 4 a.m. wars between teammates and loads of irritated people were being seen everywhere. Everyone was so annoyed about not finding solutions that they were fighting on petty issues and even during this aggressive period there were some people around. They were playing what they called as refresh-a-thon. A clip of the event is attached below.

As evident from the gif too, there were some who dozed off in that cozy environment with A.C.s providing the coolness and laptops providing the heat 😜.

Then after hours of looking at the screen, I could see a bit of reflection of sunlight from windows far from the hall in which I was. I checked the time, and it was 6 a.m. Many had left the room by then, many others were in a deep sleep dreaming of completing the task they were supposedly working on, and many others like me 😎were still after our goal. By 8 a.m. I started feeling tired and so rested my responsibility on my mates and just kept my head down for some time. I didn’t realize when I went to sleep, and when I woke up, t was 8:40 a.m. A handful of people were left in the hall and two of my teammates had gone for a walk and one was chilling beside me. He informed that we had completed the task though we had to compromise on many things we had decided to go for. The project we thought would be over way before time was just completed on time after compromising with many ideas. Though I didn’t feel right about the fact that we weren’t able to implement our plans well, I was happy that at least we got to know many many new things.

Then came the presentation time. We tried to run our program one last time to check its functionality, and to our horror, we found that it wasn’t running. We were lightening-stuck. We tried everything, but nothing worked. We thought all our efforts were all in vain. But just five minutes before our presentation miracle happened and we found our error, and it was such a trivial mistake. We rejoiced. We gave our presentation, and the judges seemed to like our idea.

Now as our turn was over, we started watching other presentation and found that every idea was creative. Some people had even made ppts, unlike us who went bare hands and spoke whatever was in our minds. I stayed till the last presentation and then with no power went to sleep. On waking up, I found we did not make it but didn’t feel bad this time and realized that this was just a learning experience.

I realized hackathons improve our overall personality. It developed our team building capability.

Referring to a TEDx video, I saw about hackathons; you don’t need to be a hacker to come to a hackathon, you come to a hackathon and become a hacker.

Are you cool enough?

Given above is the definition of a “Real Cool Person” by the urban dictionary. Few months have passed since I joined college and it’s enough time to explore different types of people around. What I observed in this time is that people try really hard to be cool. They work out on all sorts of tricks to make them look engaging.

Talking to people, I came across the fact that these cool gaiz read and watch stuff so that they can be the attention seekers, the party animals and whatnot. Few of the “COOL” things they do to seek attention are:

USING FANCY WORDS AND JARGONS

Does the use of big words make you sound smarter?
A study led by Daniel M. Oppenheimer at Princeton University, and published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology suggests that using long, academic-sounding words instead of simple, more easily-understood words makes people think you’re less intelligent.
But who will tell this to these empty-headed brats? They call themselves insane. Little do they know what it means.
Meaning of “insane” as given by Merriam Webster: exhibiting a severely disordered state of mind: affected with mental illness
They are all “Exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations & outright lies being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist.” 😂 Duh!!

SCREAMING WHILE TALKING

I do not understand why these people don’t understand it is not cool to talk loudly. It is ultra annoying at times.

EXAGGERATING WHATEVER THEY DO

credits:http://thefriendlypothole.tumblr.com

Sometimes events are purely fictitious. *Beware*

WEARING A MASK ALWAYS

People try to be “reel” all the time. They try to maintain a personality which isn’t theirs. Being original to them is like walking without clothes in the Arctic, and they need a blanket to cover themselves up.

Here are a few fails of people trying to be cool:

credits: https://www.chaostrophic.com

PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND THIS BEHAVIOUR
The reason why people act like this is the fear of being left out, and this fear has made them mad for attention. They feel they are missing out on everything and that not being cool is the end of this world for them. They turn highly insecure and then start all these practices like faking around and at the end make a fool out of themselves.

Be original, that’s what is cool about you.

I would like to end with a quote by Dale Carnegie:

“One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.”

i love paneer

I had a math quiz at college today, and yes it was hopeless. Still, I am here writing a blog for you all. No, I am not a writer, nor am I too optimistic to come here to blog and chill! It just happens to be the last date for my blog submission, and so here I am.

A brief intro, so hey I am Ansh, I don’t do much, thanks to the competitive exams basically JEE. I just left high school and joined college. Currently, I am trying to discover all the things I missed in the last two years.

Back to the blog, so I was pondering over the topic I should write a blog on and finally after hours of thinking (jk 10 minutes), I still had no idea but instead, I started feeling hungry. Thanks to this hunger I got my first blog idea and so here I am. “Why this title?”, some of you may ask. It’s the result of my procrastination to think about a better title, supported by my vegan nature. Sorry non-vegans but paneer>>>>>chicken 😛

So let’s just jump into the ravioli, the caeser salad, the margherita, the blueberry cheesecake, and THE PANEER DELICACIES. Just reading this line, most of you might be having their saliva dripping out of their mouth like food was kept away from them for ages and just the bare thought now gives them immense pleasure.

Now I present you, what you’ve all been desperately waiting for, the thing which makes a blog a food blog, the pictures.

MAKES-YOU-HUNGRY-PASTRY

PIZZA ROLLS AT BIG CHILL

PIZZA AT LA VIE PIZZERIA

I-DON’T-REMEMBER-NAMES

AND THE FAMOUS NATURALS ICE CREAM

THE SOLE LOOK AT IT MAKES ME WANT IT

HA HA

INDIAN STREET FOOD – BHALLA PAPRI AND CHOLE KULCHE

AND THE MOUTH WATERING LASSI

AND THE DESI HALWA SOAKED IN LOTS OF GHEE

WHO-CARES-ABOUT-THE-NAME

DOLMA AUNTY’s MOMOS

PASTA AT SOCIAL

THE INDIAN PLATTER

OKAY

CAN’T GET OVER LASSIS

AND SO DID YOU LIKE MY BLOG?

Thank you all those who read till this point and my friends who gave me some of their clicks. After showcasing all these mouth-watering cuisines and making you crave for them, unlucky me has the privilege to have chocos only tonight 😦