Twisted Indifference

I was messing around with off camera flash and white balance. This is the first decent photograph of myself that I have since this one. I guess I am too picky when someone else is shooting me. If you need something done right…

It struck me a while back that I had a HDR shot of bike as my profile picture on facebook but it never made to the blog. It will be rectified soon. Along with other HDR shots I experimented with here.

This was part of an assignment given but we more or less had full creative and technical control. Well, no flash allowed but then, didn’t need it. We were shooting this toward the end of August and a couple of days before the assignment was handed out I finally got delivery of my bike. I had made the mistake of trusting a transport company to get me my bike. They excelled in their lack of professionalism and overall ineptitude.

However bike finally in hand I could combine exploring the tiny streets and by-lanes of Ooty with the assignment. It is fun to walk around in Ooty but it is tiresome always having the 5 kilogram bag with your camera, lenses and other accessories on your back. The locks and doors were all discovered while riding around Ooty except for the next one that I found while on a mini road trip to a village called Achanakkal. It’s hardly 5-6 kilometers from Lovedale.

While the main street passing through Achanakkal had modern doors and locks, a short walk through the village brought me to this specimen. Chipped paint in abundance and more rust than actual lock, I hope this door wasn’t guarding anything too valuable. Not that it would have mattered much given the crime rate here is phenomenally low. Since I was done with whatever I needed for the assignment I decided to move ride on ahead and explore.

I passed some schools whose buses I would regularly see around Lovedale and Ooty but nothing worthwhile. The road leads to Ketty, a place I seem to have developed a vehement distaste for since day one in Ooty. My first day here I took a local bus back to my place in Lovedale from Ooty town. As it turned out the bus was headed no where toward where I needed to be. I wasn’t too worried since it would still have to pass the the road leading to my place. I could always pick up another bus from there.

Imagine my consternation when the conductor refuses to have the bus stopped. Taking pity on me after I unsuccessfully tried convincing the conductor that we had already passed my stop a fellow passenger informed me that this was an express bus that stopped only between major villages and that the Lovedale Junction did not qualify. The conductor even refused to let me off the bus in the middle of the road. To add insult to injury he even charged me six bucks to ride the bus till Ketty, the next stop. Cursing everything possible I had to take a return bus back to Lovedale from Ketty and for all it’s worth left a bad taste in my mouth.

I don’t really hate the place nor do I hold any grudges against any public transport employee since as I settled into my new student life I discovered that people here are extremely courteous and helpful. An essential nicety without the goody goody vibe and having a simple thank you met with a completely unpretentious wave of the hand tends to make Ooty home to the rarest form of humanity.

A year in Ooty…it is not possible to do justice to this place with photographs. Hell it’s not enough to experience the place.

I only planned to ride till Masinagudi. For the past five years I have been driving a car. I got back on the bike less than a month ago. The 35 odd kilometres to Masinagudi from Ooty seemed like a good warm up before I began riding long distances. Even though it meant passing through Kalhatty Ghat with its infamous 36 hair raising hairpin bends. Masinagudi is another one road town. Under the impression that Mudumalai was closed to random visitors I went down the road to Singara.

I held no assumptions of capturing any wildlife since the max zoom I can achieve is 200mm. While I had hoped to capture some decent landscape shots my primary motivation for being there was the ride. A few days before, I made the mistake of going to Dolphin’s Nose, a viewpoint 12-14 kms from Coonoor. I expected the destination to be a waste of time since it’s a tourist trap but I was told by colleagues who had been there that the ride is totally worth it. Man were they ever wrong. Neither is the road worth the ride nor is the view worth the abuse you take riding till Dolphin’s Nose. Given that the person who informed me belongs to the ‘All Noise No Performance’ Royal Enfield Bullet Club I should have known better than to listen to him. What I think of those junk metal piles of shit would fill another blog post.

I can digress spectacularly. The gray langur above was the only wild animal that I managed to capture. The photo is slightly blurred which may not be all that noticeable in the low res image put up here. Of course a good telephoto lens isn’t the only thing I lack, the patience needed for wildlife photography also seems to be absent in me.

So the ride to Masinagudi and Singara Power House done I figured I’d head back. Around 5 kms out of Masinagudi I had stopped to take some shots of the road and I see bunch of my batchmates heading towards me. They planned to head through Mudumalai and this was the time I was informed that there’s a bloody national highway that passes through it. Duh! Too kicked at riding through roads which put all roads in Maharashtra (expressway and part of golden quadrilateral excluded) to shame I did not stop to take any photographs.

The motorcade now included a Mercedes ML 270, a Maruti Zen and me on my Pulsar 200 DTS-i. We crossed Mudumalai and came to the border checkpost that led into Karnataka. It was interesting to note that the Tamil Nadu – Karnataka border lay less than 80 kms from Ooty. While it is essentially the same reserve, being in Karnataka it is called Bandipur. The roads got even better. I had to take the shot. Click on it to view a larger image.

The highway through Mudumalai was peppered with speed bumps. Bandipur was not. Prudence might have called for a leisurely cruise through the forests but as I mentioned earlier I don’t buy into the all noise no performance propaganda. I was also finally getting the opportunity to unleash the full capabilities of my bike. My bike is no Hayabusa but we scorched the roads of Bandipur nonetheless.

I forgot the name of the village from where you take the road leading to Gopalswamy Betta but I’m pretty sure it was the first village we entered after Bandipur. It just couldn’t get any better. It was like a karmic reward for something good that I must have done somewhere. Or I was being handed this for enduring the miserable ride to Dolphin’s Nose. Regardless I was happy to collect. Not just on the view and the road but also the fact that I managed to capture half the sistine chapel.

It’s a little difficult to say how far I rode to get there since during the whole ride there was a lot of oscillations between two destinations. My total riding that day was 192.8 kms but riding straight to Gopalswamy Betta and back to Ooty without my diversions would be a lot less. Being there was totally worth it.

Sprawling green forests and a view way better than I captured since I was also hindered by a tooth ache that was triggered by the cold winds. On a side note the root canal procedure is finished and the cold wind can do me no harm. Well it does have me down with fever but that was my fault. Riding into the wind is one thing. Taunting it by forgetting to wear a jacket on a recent trip to Pykara was essentially stupid.