“Two turkeys do not make an Eagle”, but…

…”Two bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, one day decided to fly”

What have been the top two buzzwords in the tech world in the last four days?

No prizes for getting this right – Nokia and Microsoft.

So finally Nokia decides to bite the bullet and admit that the Symbian Operating System is generations behind the rest. In particular, behind the Google Android and the Apple iOS. It was evident from the market share drop of Nokia from 70% a few years ago to just 32% in 2010!

Nokia did realize earlier on that it had to get its act together to remain competitive in the smartphone market. Exactly a year ago, thus was born a very ‘promising’, ‘next-generation’ smartphone platform – the Symbian^3. All the hype and hoopla around the platform fizzed out right after it was released. Yet again, Nokia disappointed and the Symbian^3 came nowhere close to the Android or the iOS in terms of performance.

The Nokia brand itself is never reckoned in any discussion/review of smartphones.  It is indeed quite sad.  

So is the Microsoft deal a last ditch attempt by Nokia to get back into the game? And is Windows Phone 7 really the right way to go?

WP7 was released sometime last October, around the time when I was still figuring out which smartphone to buy. The reviews I had read on this were the worst ever, even worse than any of the Symbian O/S’.

Just to give you an idea, some of the features were:

1: No Multi-tasking

2: No Copy/paste

3: No Videocalling

4: No USB Mass Storage mode??? What the heck???

Of course all the above were supposed to be rectified in later versions, but that’s a different issue.

(Point to note: My Nokia C7, running on Symbian^3 supports all the above and much more.)

Other than these obvious flaws, the WP7 has the Zune Music player for playing Music.  Now I have never used this before, but I have heard enough criticism of the same.

Needless to say, the phone was a huge flop.

Why would Nokia then go with Microsoft? An act of desperation?

Forget MSFT for a bit, what were the other options for Nokia?

a)   Try and improve Symbian and bring it up to the mark with competition –not quite encouraging, given the failed attempts so far.

b)   Go with the Linux based MeeGo Operating System. Well, even as the market was eagerly awaiting a MeeGo operating device, Nokia decided to dump it even before it was given a chance.

c)    Go with Android?!! Ah! Nokia would never swallow its ego and succumb to market pressures and get onto the Google bandwagon! The header of this post  and the war of words says it all. But yeah, even so there could be other issues. One – Nokia may not be comfortable with the open nature of the app market, and the potential security risk, although I have never really heard of any such issue with Android phones. Then every other smartphone manufacturer these days is running Android Phones. Not just the Samsung, HTC and Motorola varieties, but also the Micromaxes, the G’fives, the Lavas and the Lemons. Where will Nokia fit in, in this Android heap?

Nokia was always known for its hardware, its sturdiness and dependability – characteristics that nobody cares much for these days with rock bottom prices of mobile handsets.

Coming back to Microsoft, the deal should be a good one for Microsoft rather than for Nokia. Given the strong brand value that Nokia still commands despite the market share decline, and given Microsoft’s own failure in smartphones, this could be a great opportunity for MSFT. No wonder there was a news article that said “Nokia Corp will get billions of dollars from Microsoft Corp to ditch its current smartphone software in favour of Windows Phone 7”

But what happens to Nokia now, its customers and its app developers? Nokia now has to manage three different eco-systems. Symbian, MeeGo (there is no app system as of now) and WP7. Will they really get all these app developers for all their operating systems? What kind of an app ecosystem does WP7 have at present?

As a customer, would you be interested in buying a Nokia device that comes with WP7? Perhaps a device with Android, I would buy; but I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of money in the untested waters WP7.

Maybe the Nokia-Microsoft deal had a lot more to do with the fact that Stephen Elop was an ex-employee of MSFT.

So will this be a game changer or will Nokia remain a Walking Dead?

I don’t really care; I am now losing faith in Nokia. My next phone will probably be an Icecream Sandwich.

Hogenakkal…

The planning:

It had been a while since I and my roommate went on a weekend trip together. The last one was Masinagudi, which was in October 2010. So we decided to go to Hogenakkal on the 29^th of January – a one day trip. This time I wanted to have a reserved return ticket in advance, as I didn’t want to end up in a messy situation like the previous trip when we had gone without tickets and ended up taking a cab at the last minute, getting stuck in terrible traffic and finally reaching home only around midnight.

Moreover, this time it was relatively simple, I had most of the info required as I had researched it well enough. The route that we needed to follow was:

Bangalore (BLR) – Hosur (HSR) – Krishnagiri (KGR) – Dharmapuri (DPJ) – Hogenakkal (HKL)

The plan was to leave our house at 5.30 am, take a bus to Hosur and go to KGR from there, spend half an hour at KGR, leave for DPJ and then HKL. My estimate was to be at HKL by 11 am latest, so that we can spend 3-4 hours and leave the place by 4 pm to board the return train from DPJ at 4.45pm.

The onward journey:

BLR-KGR

We woke up only at 6 am, left the house at 6.45, and boarded a Salem bound Express bus to KGR at around 7 am. I don’t remember the last time I got on to a local government bus as  bad as that one. The seats were cushioned, but all worn and torn, quite congested and dirty, and the bus was playing really local Tamil songs (which was fun in a way actually). The minute we entered the bus, the seated passengers were all looking at us with astonishment as if we were alien creatures from outer space. We did look quite unfit in that ambience though. Two women, dressed in track pants and sport shoes, entering a bus with backpacks, a bus full of traditionally attired village folk of Tamil Nadu, well you get the picture.

Okay, so pretty soon we made ourselves comfortable, enjoying ourselves, chatting, joking, eating, studying the surroundings and listening to the really funny tam songs. We then decided to take a “Trip Oath” (learnt this term during this trip) that “we would eat lots of junk and get really tired so that we burn out all the excess calories consumed” and high-fived over it!

Krishnagiri

The bus reached Krishnagiri at 9.15 am. We took an auto to the dam, after negotiating for a return trip to the bus stop for 270 bucks.

The auto chap dropped us in front of the entrance to the Dam. There was a small bamboo shed over there where we saw food. We were famished and decided to have breakfast over there. The menu was simple – Parothas and Kuska (some kind of veg biryani). After ensuring that the food was Saivam (learnt a new word in Tamil that means Vegetarian), we sat down to eat food that was served on a plantain leaf, which is very typical of traditional Tamilnadu. There were all goats and chicken roaming around the place.

 

The place was quite rustic, but also very comforting. We were made to feel at home by our breakfast host. After breakfast, we went to check out the surroundings. As we had gone there quite early, there was no tourist crowd around and it was pretty calm and serene.

Here are a few pics.

 

 We left the Dam vicinity by around 10 am, on our way to DPJ.

KGR-HKL

We left KGR bus stop at around 10.30 am and reached DPJ at around 11.50 am and got onto a bus to HKL that was supposed to start at 12.00pm. By now I realized that I had grossly underestimated the distance and timings. A friend had told me earlier that it was just a 20 minute journey from DPJ to HKL and I took that for granted, without bothering to verify. At DPJ, I saw that HKL was a cool 46kms away and you could imagine how long it would take traveling in local government bus stopping every 5 kms. Needless to say, the bus reached HKL only at 1.45 pm. By now we realized that there was no way we would be able to take the return train (with reservation) back to Bangalore. The train was to start off from DPJ at 4.45, which would mean that we should leave HKL at 3 pm. So we decided to chuck the train, enjoy ourselves and think of our return only after we were done touring the place.

Hogenakkal

It was quite warm at 2.00pm in Hogenakkal, after all we were in Tamil Nadu. The first thing we did was buy a fancy hat to protect ourselves from the heat (and also to take some cool photographs). We directly went to the place where we had to board the Parisal (another new Tamil word I learnt, which meant coracle – a small circular boat made of bamboo)

Mr. Madhavan, the captain of our ship, was quite warm and friendly. We learnt from him that the coracle ride system is unionized. A coracle ride cost us 620 bucks for two persons whereas a family of 4-5 would end up paying around 700-800 for a single boat. All the payment is taken by the union leader, who monitors the entire workflow. Approximately 100 boat rides happen in a single day and each boatman gets to go out maximum twice a day. So, we can assume around 60-70 boatmen operating there. In some ways it’s a good thing that these guys have a union of sorts in operation, at-least ensures a regular stream of income and whittles the competition.

So coming back to our trip, right from the word “Go”, I started clicking away photographs of the waterfalls:

Hey, look at this dude here in a coracle, selling Frito Lays and Pepsis!

Amazing stuff! This is what is called commercialization of Cauvery waters!

The water here was apparently 100 feet deep! Wow, it certainly didn’t look so, with all the fish floating around right at the surface that one could just catch a few by grazing their palm on the water. And during monsoons it gets worse, at-least 10-15 ft deeper. Should go there sometime during the monsoons too, I guess.

As Mr. Madhavan took us closer to the waterfalls, the force was enough to get us all wet and fill the boat too with water even without getting off. Upon our insistence though, he allowed us to get off the boat and soak ourselves under one of the smaller falls. That was real fun. Our boatman was a bit of an entertainer too, he tried out stunts like rotating the Parisal really fast along the axis, while stationary. He was also kind enough to give us a chance to row the boat.

It wasn’t too bad; with some practice I would have surely aced it 🙂

The coracle ride was an hour and a half long, after which we decided to explore the area on our own. We got some tea and walked towards the hanging bridge.  To my horror, I found dozens of monkeys occupying the bridge. My friend here was the brave one, nudged me to ignore the monkeys and walk on. Of course, I was too scared; I have had some really bitter experiences with monkeys in the past. All of a sudden one of them started chasing me. My friend told me to put the cup of tea down, as that was what the monkey was actually looking for. But I was not willing to part with my cup of chai, I started running back with the monkey in hot pursuit. Luckily for me there were a few men around who saw my plight and chased the monkey away.

After some exploration, we reached closer to one of the water falls – “Cine Falls” it was called. 

We were really looking for a place exclusive to women, where we could enjoy standing under the falls. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any such exclusive place.  Instead what we saw a bunch of huge pot-bellied men under the falls, bathing  “each other” with soap and water !! Ugh. What an ugly sight it was. 

Anyway, finally we found a small stream in the vicinity, where we decided to get completely wet in the water. 

This was a lot of fun and by the end of it we were famished, so we decided to have some food before we took leave of Hogenakkal. Food was yet again a traditional affair, like the one we had at Krishnagiri, parotas served on a plantain leaf.

Next thing we looked for was a rest room. The waiter directed us to the first floor of the restaurant (which by the way was adjacent to a bar). We went upstairs, to the end of the corridor and saw a room that was latched from the outside. Thinking it may be the restroom, we opened the door. We were absolutely startled to see what was inside. The entire room was filled with liquor bottles! We got really scared as to what kind of a shady place we had entered and instantly took to our heels and came out of the building as quickly as possible.

Time for our return journey.

The local experience

All through the trip we had travelled by local buses. It was really weird actually; both of us felt so out of place even though both of us are from Tamil Nadu. For one, we did not even remotely look like any of the locals in the bus, nor did we look like we knew Tamil and we were the only two women around in track pants/kurta/tee shirt. We felt like foreigners in our own land. Everyone we interacted with – the local women, the policemen, the boatman, the hotel waiters, the bus conductor etc seemed quite surprised that we both were travelling on our own. Stuff like “Only the two of you are travelling? How do you know Tamil? Veli ooru kara (outsiders)” were most common. I guess two women travelling on their own is not a common sight in the hinterland of Tamilnadu atleast. Even so, most of them were quite warm and friendly and expressed concerned about our safety. Then there were other funny things. It had been ages since I had travelled in such crowded buses with people standing. There was this bus at Dharmapuri, before it started off for Hogenakkal. All kinds of hawkers and beggars entered the bus and were annoying the passengers. There was this one weirdo, who came with a broomstick and brushed our heads with it, asking for money! Of course, everything was not as pleasant and fun during the trip; we did have our not so good moments too. For instance, there was this bunch of hooligans who entered the bus at Hosur, and were trying to create trouble for us.

Weirdos and hooligans apart, the bus journeys and the views surrounding us en-route was quite charming, especially the HSR-KGR route. There were vast fields on either side  of the road all through the way, felt somewhat like we were on agriculture tourism. Then the food, the traditional manner in which food was served and the local lingo. It was somewhat like village tourism too!

The return journey

After changing three buses and an auto, we finally manage to reach home by 10.30 pm.  It felt so much at home in the hustle bustle of the city….after being aliens in our own homeland Tamil Nadu for a whole day! It was a good experience. Alongside a tourist/adventure trip, we also got a taste of the ‘real’ Tamil nadu and the life in the hinterlands.

Of course, one of the decisions we made after the trip was to travel by a cab instead of local modes of transport.