Hyderabad

We're back from Hyderabad today morning. It was a very good trip, meeting several good friends and relatives but not a lot to blog about.

I was glad to be back on a train, and in 2nd class. It seems that I start getting itchy if I don't ride a train fairly often. My last time was in November and that too AC. AC is nice of course but you don't get to see the scenery properly and you don't feel the outside breeze so its hardly like a journey.

I took my camera along but kept forgetting to take photos so missed a few good photoops. I haven't yet reached the zen state of photography where I view the world through a virtual lens always looking out for the right photo-op. The picture above is with friends at a restaurant (Shakuntala and her husband Ramakrishna). And the one below has my nephew Siddhu in it.



There is a story with Siddhu: he was 15 minutes away from submitting his original certificates (a crossing the rubicon/laxman rekha thing) to a college in Trichy to join the engineering course there, when he heard that he had qualified to join the government architecture college in Hyderabad. Not just qualified but was ranked 3rd! After some heavy-duty decision-making, they (he and dad primarily) decided to go with the architecture and he hasn't looked back since then. He's having a ball of a time and doing well too. Its really really fantastic and a little scary to see him escape the engineering treadmill by just a whisker. He's a great kid and I look forward to see him do well in life.

We picked up Priya's B.Ed. degree certificate, which was the actual reason we had gone to Hyderabad. She met her principal and teachers and was happy.

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To complement my previous posts on summer fruit, here's a pic of the original summer fruit: mango