I took nearly 10 days off from my work and was in my native for the Pongal Festival. I would say that this is the most important festival in Tamilnadu more than Diwali and others. People be with their dear ones and enjoy throughout.

And, this would be more colorful in the Villages where there would be a lot of functions, entertainments, et all. I also hail from a beautiful village, Nallur, Tirupur. But, we moved to township when I was in my 9th grade. But, we keep visiting my village often. Pongal is one festival which would be celebrated by everyone over there and we young guns organize a lot of fun activities for close to 3 days.

Starts with some athletic races for the kids, to musical corner for ladies, housewifes, and mother-in-laws. For males, we do have the authentic "Valukku maram" and "Uri adithal". It was really fun to watch these. Below are some snaps of my Village Shiva Temple and people gathering there to watch the "Valukku maram" yeruthal

Here is two more snaps shot with my HTC Touch when we went to Balaji Temple, Hills of VaalPaarai, Tamilnadu.

It was a great road trip on our new Mahindra Scorpio, but in the end while returning everybody were tired and the kids started vomiting because of the drive from the hill. It was the most difficult road I've ever driven, very steep hairpin bends, OMG!! In the end, all fine!

Cheers

Hmmmm, I wanted to visit Chennai for a long time. Guess I was there before 4 years, but missed to visit few places, one of which is the Parthasarathy Temple, Triplicane. This time I made sure that I visit the temple. I should say that this is one of the greatest temple's I ever visited. Very big, and very majestic Rajagopuram.

Also, went to the Besant Nagar beach - Ashtalakshmi temple and that too was a great temple. But, i found that to be untidy, not maintained properly. But, the beach makes it a perfect place to be there in the evening. I'm sure I'd there always in the evenings if I happened to live in Chennai.

Also took few snaps with my HTC Touch and below are few:

Not sure where I saw some similar pictures, but I always wanted to have my name written on the beach sand and take a snap of it. For some reason, I liked it.

In fact, I went to Chennai for my VISA interview to fly to Seattle, USA for a short business trip. Hope that trip would be memorable. And, this is my first overseas trip and hope I would enjoy it.

I was provided with a taxi in Chennai and was driven by a good young driver, Suresh. He was so good. I tell this because I see a lot of taxi drivers daily in Bangalore and I don't like most of their attitudes towards the traffic, people, mostly travel. They don't enjoy their profession, but rather curse each and every vehicle passing by. But, this guy made me change my opinion on drivers. He was so patient, good in driving and a good friend. He took me to a lot of places in Chennai, and enjoyed the drive completely.

I should say that the Chennai roads are very good and better than those of Bangalore. And the traffic in Chennai doesn't seem to stay for hours together unlike Bangalore traffic where we got to wait for hours to cross a signal.

Happy New Year 2008 to everyone! Let everyone get what they deserve this new year.

This new year has already brought me into the Windows Mobile world. I always wanted to get a Pocket PC mobile, but never had it before. But, this new year has got me one - oh yeah, I got one for this new year, whatever it is.

I got a new HTC Touch and also get a new Airtel connection. HTC Touch is really a cool phone and it has all the features I really wanted. But, it lacks a few things like GPS and 3G. But all I wanted is a phone with WiFi, Bluetooth, 2MP camera, GPRS, touch interface, et all.

This phone which I got was actually a refreshed one P3452 with 128MB of RAM, and 256 MB of main memory. Initially HTC released the same model P3450 with 64MB of RAM which was little slow. Most of my friends played to be early-users, but again they missed this 128MB RAM thing which in fact is very much needed.

Lately I also activated Internet on my Airtel connection which uses EDGE. And, I would say that the speed is not that good, but pretty decent. Here is where the 3G feature would play a big role in the future, but at least now, I'm happy with this in India.

Here are some great applications I feel in love with, to use them in my HTC Touch:

    1. Palringo

Great IM tool - You can login to Live/Yahoo/Gtalk Messenger services. This also has a powerful option to send voice clips, photos in a matter of few clicks.

    2. Windows Live for Mobile

        Gives access to all Live Services.

    3. SPB GPRS Monitor

        Gives me a view of my Internet bandwidth usage.

    4. Google Maps and Virtual Earth mobile

        Do you need any introduction to this?

    5. SPB Insight

Great Mobile RSS reader - My frequently used application - this deserves a play in my Home Screen.

    6. Skype for mobile

        Do you need any introduction for this too?

    7. Yahoo! Go mobile

Gives access to all Yahoo! services - worth mentioning is the cool Flickr uploader tool which is kinda cool.

Have a great year ahead!