Jaipur

True to my name, I had recently wandered down to Jaipur, the city of princes. The first thing you notice at the airport is the terminal. There are no buses to ferry you from the plane. No airbridges either. You step down from the plane and saunter across to the terminal building- if the weather is mild. In summers when the temperature on the tarmac is a sizzling 45-47 degrees centigrade, you come out of the plane - temp inside the plane is around 23- and understand the meaning of the term "a cat on a hot tin roof"
Anyway, the airport is small, well kept and pretends to be international- there are immigration counters which nobody uses. I think Jaipur has a large number of people with large curling moustaches. I dont know whether the moustaches signify royal descent or camel riding desert bandit ancestors. And I am too meek to ask. The city itself treats you like royalty. They just want your money! I went to a well known sweet shop in Johari Bazaar. I must have stood out in the crowd because the moment I stepped in, a rather good looking lady ( I call all ladies goodlooking because the good ones expect it and others appreciate it) was at my side wanting to know what I wanted to buy. Maybe in Jaipur they are trained to smell out suckers. I started purchasing some sweets and the lady kept pointing out the postive attributes of the things that I had not bought. So I ended up buying sweets & condiments for friends, relatives, neighbours, office colleagues, et al.
The hawa mahal is in bad shape. It was meant to be a pink facade with windows through which the ladies of the royal household would watch processions etc. Now the pink colour is peeling off and no lady would like to be caught dead behind the windows.
The city itself is a tourist hot spot. Shops selling trinkets abound and the age old bandits have now reformed. They don't loot caravans in the desert anymore. They simply fleece gullible tourists!
Except for a few places, the traffic on the roads is light. In many places the city has replaced traffic lights and speed breakers with potholes which are far more efficient at managing traffic than the former.
I came away from city with the distinct feeling that it suffers from ennui. With all the resources at their diposal, the city still apeears to be basking in its past glory rather than moving on. This makes me sad.

Sudoku

Some of my friends who are keeping track of this blog, for friendship sake or because they feel that not doing so will invite my wrath, asked me why I have stopped blogging. The fact is that I have suddenly become a sodoku addict.
This blog is dedicated for those of you who are still innocent of this addiction. Many things emerging out of japan (the country not the acronym) have taken the world by storm - electronics, cars, beyblades and now sudoku. It comprises of a grid of 81 squares in 9X9 format. This grid is further broken into 9 sub-squares, each comprising 3 rowsX 3 columns. The player has to fill numbers from 1 - 9 in these squares in manner that there is no repetition in each column, row or sub-square. Some numbers are provided randomly in the grid and the player has to fill in the rest. Obvoiusly, there can be only one solution or every combination. At the last count, there were about 10 billion combinations. The game has caught on fast and is staple diet for the entertainment page of every respectable daily newspaper. I prefer the web based sudoku which comes with its own timer. For a couch potato like me, solving one game within the given timeframe is far more satisfying than doing push ups.
For those of you who are getting sold to the idea of trying out sudoku, there are two websites that I would recommend:
http://www.websudoku.com
http://colinj.co.uk/Sudoku_solve/sudoku_solver.htm
The latter provides you with a solver which you can use to solve the difficult variants also.