One of the first questions that pops up when you mention that you visited the U.K. is that have you visited Oxford. This Saturday, six of us decided to answer that question in affirmative. Would we get to see the coveted Oxford college at this late juncture of our lives? Or even manage to get a degree? We wittily mused. Reaching at 10 am in Oxford, most of the planning was done in the Tourism information centre itself. They were so thoughtful that they have a walking guide that covers all the important places you’d like to visit there. It is as simple as blindly following the arrows.

Even so with my famous sense of direction, I managed to reach a dead end at an uncrowded mall. Smitha and Bharathy decided it would be a good time to open the tiffin box. I was too busy gobbling down the Bread Upama. While JD didn’t miss the opportunity to tease about the girls' culinary skills. Meanwhile Jaanavi bought some essential supplies to ‘fuel’ us for the rest of the day.

Cornered in the Quad

Though unfortunately many colleges were closed on Saturday, the most important (and spectacular) one wasn’t. That was Christ Church/College

• where Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka. Lewis Carroll) taught and in the settings of which based his famous book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ . Some of the nooks and crannies of the place began looking eerily familiar when someone pointed out that many parts of the college was used for shooting the Harry Potter movies. The rectangular grassy open space in the centre (referred to as the Quadrangle) was truly breathtaking. Whenever this happens, that is, stumbling across such breathtaking vistas - the inevitable, the unavoidable happens. The next 15 mins is taking pictures of the individuals, sometimes in different permutations, with our gorgeous view backdrop. Rather, whatever you could make out of the view from the jigsaw puzzle that was created. Newbie photographers like me prefer to shoot just the landscape, but my more knowledgeable friends never fail to advice me - “Da fool, how will others know that you visited that place”. I scratch my head and grin as if I’m a fool and move on. Enough of my rant on photography.

As we went inside the church, a sweet lady noticed our interest in the stained glass paintings and offered to explain. For the next 30 minutes or so, I have never experienced such a perceptive and detailed analysis of a place or an object. It was like she was taking us hand in hand through time. Retelling forgotten tales peppered with humour, unravelling hidden forms from a seemingly complex artwork, pointing out awe inspiring characteristics that would be normally missed by a casual observer, she would weave herself and us across the Church. Hearing I’m from Kerala, she mentioned that she is writing a children’s book based on and elephant from Kerala. No wonder she is so good at story telling besides being patiently meticulous about finer details.

As we made exit from Christ Church, it started drizzling. But we continued visiting most of the colleges which comprise the world famous Oxford University. Being a weekend and vacation time, many of them were closed, but we managed to go inside a few of them. They were quite different from our Indian colleges. Mainly it was designed for a lot less people and had a lot of well maintained green spaces.

If we ever visit Oxford another time, I would surely try out the water ways, as it practically encircles the city. After a fair bit of (window) shopping at high street we boarded our return trains.

Surp- Rising

This Sunday we saw ‘The Rising’, a period drama based on the first war of Indian independence centred around the life of Managal Pandey. I expected a pretty boring retelling of events. I was surprised to find it quite well written both in terms of story and dialogue. However, it failed in numerous areas. The characters were not fleshed out well (even Mangal!) and the songs were jarring interruptions to the serious tone of the movie. I’m not writing a full review here, as the celebrities say, see it for yourself!

Remember how in UNIX how easy it was to run python scripts? Just type name of the script. No need to even type the extension .py

I got soon fed up with typing

C: > python foo.py

in windows. Digging up some Microsoft documentation, I soon found a way to simply type

C: > foo

and make it work. How? read on…

All you need is to create a batchfile, say ‘startme.bat’ with the two lines

ASSOC .py=PythonScript
FTYPE PythonScript=python.exe %1 %*
set PATHEXT=.py;%PATHEXT%

If you want this to be the default behaviour everywhere, put this in ‘autoexec.bat’. But wait, we have a better way to do this. You can make ‘startme.bat’ work like ‘.bashrc’ in UNIX by registry hack. Create a REG file, say ‘cmd-changer.reg’ with the contents:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor]
"AutoRun"="startme.bat"

Now opening this file will merge it to the registry. Now ‘startme.bat’ will be run every time you open the command prompt say by typing ‘cmd.exe’ in the Run command box. Hope this helps!

Sun, Sand and … you know what. Mixing six ordinary desis with that deadly cocktail will result in the inevitable. A weekend of pure escape in a scenic (check out the pictures) place called Bournemouth.

Here is a recipe I wish I had when I was learning to cook. For the benefit of all the Indian bachelors who are gonna start cooking, I give you - a lifesaver:

How to make Pulaaaaaoooooo

Or

Idiot’s Guide to Homely Indian Food

Since I’m going to teach you this ultra cool recipe, you are going to do all the cutting and slicing. He, he, he… start with the onions. We’ll need half a piece. Cut it into small pieces. And a tomato too. You can keep them together if you are really stingy and cannot afford many bowls (like… say a cookery show).

I’m assuming we are preparing for 2 (But that I’m eating both is a totally different matter altogether), so take 1 cup of rice. Now “wash” the rice. It’s easy - Pour some running water on the rice, do some sort of cleaning action with your fingers and drain it off. Do this 2-3 times, till the water gets clear. Now drain off all the water.

Take a pan-like vessel. Pour some oil so that it is about 3 millimetres high. Now, put some mustard seeds and cumin seeds. Heat on medium flame till the mustards starts “popping”. Now add your onions and tomato pieces. Did I remind you to cut potatoes? Of course, I did, you idiot. Well, one small potato is fine. Keep stirring till the onions turn slightly golden (or fumes fills the nearby room ;) )

Time for Masala mix. No, not the TV programme. Real masala. It’s roughly like this (all are in tea-spoons):

• 1 spoon turmeric powder
• 2 spoon dhaniya powder
• 1 spoon masala powder
• 1 spoon red chilly powder
• 3 spoon salt

Keep stirring till the onions looks shrunk (or your roommates starts coughing in the nearby room). Looks good? Maybe not. It sure tastes amazing. Not yet, you fool. Just wait some more. For now, transfer it to a pressure cooker or a large vessel.

If you are cooking in a pressure cooker, use twice as much water as rice (note to use the same cup you used to measure rice). Close the cooker and let it cook. If its an open vessel, use thrice as much water. Stir occasionally to prevent the frothing up effect (not as cool as it sounds, very messy actually).

Turn off the cooker after you hear three “proper” whistles (as in, not half whistles or hissing sounds). Or in an open vessel, wait till the water dries up (or till your roomates start jumping out of the window)

That’s it. You were expecting more, right? Sorry, that’s all there is to it.

Tip: Best eaten with Yogurt/Ketchup

As I write this, I’m receiving reports of the numerous killed in the blasts. I express sympathy for them from the bottom of my heart, as I could have been one of them.

Today morning, I had plans to go to office early as UAT was still going on. This entire week I was reaching ahead of time, because I was taking the bottom-line for the UAT. Except for yesterday, I have been successful in coming early, despite my fondness to stay up late. Fortunately, I overslept. Missing my train, I reached at 9:30 in Liverpool Street. It was sealed off. Since this has happened a couple of times before, for incidents like fire outbreaks, I was not very perturbed. But people were talking about a certain “explosion”. However, in the haste of trying to reach office, I choose to ignore such “minor distractions”.

Now, what normally people would do to reach my office in Barbican would be walk for 15 minutes or catch a bus. Whenever I choose to walk I would fumble with my directions and barely manage to reach. This time, I tempted fate and tried to “figure out” the right direction. I literally strayed my way towards Tower Hill (those who know the way will be rolling on the floor laughing) and retraced my way back. I crossed several affected “areas” like Aldgate station and kept wondering what all the cops and choppers were doing. At several places the yellow vested police told me to return as the road was closed. It seemed so strange. I was in a sea of men and women in formals, rushing towards their office. Perhaps, that’s why there were not many onlookers, as it would have been in India. The weather, as if on cue, was dark, gloomy and damp since morning. Reaching Liverpool, I tried afresh and managed to reach Barbican.

First thing I did was let everyone who were still travelling to return home. Then I called home and all near and dear to tell them that I’m safe. Now we are practically glued to news websites and the news is now slowly trickling in. The death toll at last count was 40. It seems there will be no office tomorrow. We know it is a terrorist attack, but the cause is not known. London won Olympics bid yesterday and there are lot of protests regarding G8. Al-Queda has claimed the responsibility. But even if that’s so, they haven’t given any reason. I hope things will come back to normalcy soon.

[Images courtesy: BBC and Sky News websites]