eclipse [the non astronomy one]...

this last week a small village in bihar - targena - garnered a lot of interest all of a sudden... firangs with their fancy photographic instruments, astronomers with their study and scientific material and behind all of them, running late, our government babus scurrying to provide facilities to all... the village which apparently did not have sufficient drinking water and general electricity earlier was overnight well stocked with mineral water and gensets! of course the reason was very good visibility of the event of path-crossing of the grand-daddy of our solar system - the sun and our good old moon... and to make it special, this total solar eclipse was one of those seriously long ones and one which comes after a seriously long time! [by-the-way an overcast sky played spoilsport causing an anti-climax for all enthusiasts!]

anyway, i am not so fascinated by celestial bodies and i was rather keen to attend another 'eclipse' event - ASIA's first and annual eclipse summit - organized by the all-black-tees saltmarch team. before i go ahead, this event was a symbiosis between

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saltmarch, who are the folks that organized the immensely popular 'great indian developer summit' and


ancit consulting, the only real eclipse community representation in the indian sub-continent...

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so for those, to whom i have *never* bragged about my work [:) honestly many!], this eclipse refers specifically to a platform/framework/IDE - all in computer and programmatic terms! now if that puts you off - well, don't worry, because i am not going to write all technical!

this 'eclipse summit '09' was organized in bengaluru [bangalore] at the chancery pavilion [which by-the-way is a pretty neat hotel situated right in the centre of bangalore's business district - or so i was told]! so with 5 of my colleagues from tibco, i trudged along to listen to sessions/seminars for the first time after college...

i was visiting bangalore after a really long time and my last memories of the place were mostly of using "kannada bara tilla" or something-that-sounded-similar whenever someone quickly talks to you there... then bangalore was this moderately paced city which had probably one big shopping mall and my cousins used to take me to mg road [that cliched road in every indian city], which was supposed to be amongst the buzzing places in town... this time around, mg road [and it's cousin brigade road where we stayed] were still the most buzzing places of the city but in general the place had changed a LOT! the airport for example is fairly impressive and more impressive are the roads from the airport to the city... however, it is painfully far and the traffic is well, worse than my home town! :) however, the bus service, of whatever little i used, was great! and yes bangalore has this ubiquitous presence of software folks... of the 11 random people i met in those 3 days [in the bus & or at the bus stop / one chai shop / in the hotel] - all of them were software professionals, all of them were programmers and all of them wrote java!!! one can be amazed at probably what are the odds of finding at least 1 normal non-technical person in this city!

so 16th night we made it to our hotel and were supremely hungry... so we set out to find a decent place to eat and our patience was really running short... we found this shisha place called 'soul' off mg road that looked just about fine... it had some people when we entered and well as soon as we made the first order, almost all the guests had left [it was almost as if they were waiting for us to take the bait!]... anyway, we had a pretty lacking dinner... mainly because:

• because of lack of other guests at the restaurant
• lack of items served from the menu and
  
• above all, lack of the manager's basic maths skills!

at the end, after much clarification the bill was corrected with the surprise prized winner being paneer lababbbbbbdar [as the mongolian import kept calling the dish] over all the other meaty items!

Anyway, it was about time we hit the sack... we used to consistently get the friendly reminders from the devmarch/saltmarch guys of the registration timings and prizes and events... i, for one, find any activity before 10 am a challenge and these folks kept hammering the deadline of 9 am! :(

is being continued...