Athirappilly Falls - Kerala

After having a ton of fun at Thekkadi on our recent India trip, we moved on to visit the Athirappalli (Tamil pronounciation) or Athirappilly (as they say it Malayalam) falls with a short stop at Kalady. 

Kalady is the birth place of Adi Sankara, the man who rejuvenated Hinduism across India when it was under threat from invasion on all sides. However cute as Kalady is as a small village on the banks of the Poorna(now Periyaar) river, I did not see anything special there. It was just another temple that was not even maintained to the standards of other important temples. The place could seriously use an upgrade. Moving on... 

Athirappalli is amazing! It was worth the drive on the windy Ghat roads, the trek on slippery stones down to the bottom and walking with plastic ponchos through and through. Totally worth it!

We get to see a lot of tall falls, but few wide ones here. One notable exception was Burney McArthur falls. This one is like a supersize version of Burney McArthur falls when it comes to the volume of water flowing down. Given that we were there in the middle of the monsoon, it was breathtaking!

I did take a slow motion video with the iPhone5, but somehow uploading it to Youtube makes it lose the slo-mo effect. 

If you visit Kerala, this place is a must see. On a touristy note, the ponchos are sold by vendors a good kilometer before you approach the ticket booth entrance for 100 to 120 Rupees. The store at the entrance sells it for 50 Rupees. Our kids learnt an economics lesson there which was interesting. 

Some pictures from the few hours we spent there. It was challenging to get anything there. Even if you have weatherproof 1000 dollar lenses with fancy hoods, the water just forms a fine mist in the air and hits you from all directions. I used to wipe down with a cloth, then aim, shoot, repeat. 

We came back up with happy thoughts and smiles on our faces. Just look at the little ones face on that last picture. It sums up our emotions walking in the mist!

When I post a picture on Facebook of how many states I have visited in the US over the last 21 years of staying here and many friends who were born and raised here tell me that is a lot more than they have seen! There are folks I know who have not seen any state other than California, Nevada or Oregon! 

India is also a vast country. When I was growing up, there was not a lot of time or money to go see the country. Our parents did take us on vacations within the state and to neighbouring Andra Pradesh using their LTC( Leave Travel Concession) tickets every summer. We used to love those trips, have fun visiting temples, taking bath in pristine rivers, etc. but they were like local travel. Not a wide exposure to the rest of the country.

Studying in Varanasi helped break that for me. 

Now that we have the ability to plan trips better and see more things in a short time, we are discovering a piece of India on every trip, even if the trips are few and far between.

This trip was after a gap of 3 years, so we covered two places that were on the list. Kerala and Rajasthan. 

Have finally started looking at photos from the Rajasthan trip.. will post them soon.

It's Athimber day!

I have always wanted the world to celebrate Chitappa and Periappa day and most importantly Athimber day!

For non Tamil folks

Chitappa = dad's younger brother or Mom's younger sisters husband

Periappa = dad's older brother or Mom's older sisters husband

Athimber = dad's sisters husband

Happened to walk with kids to do "back to school" shopping and saw this on the aisle..

Had no freaking idea that there is a "day" for grandparents. How could the Hallmark lobby in Congress do such a collosal mistake? If you are going to commercialize and capitalize on such things, the logic dictates you have separate days for Grandma and Grandpa! 

Also did not get the "Nana" bit and its subsection, but then again, there are a lot of things I don't seem to get these days. 

It is time for us to start Chitappa, Periappa and Athimber day. Onnu vitta Naathanaar day might also be a good idea. When we have specific terms for relationships, they are best honored with a day and some nice cards.

Someone needs to take this idea seriously, or I will !!

:)

Given that I requested a few other days in the past.. this is not new.

ps. I read my old posts and go " What happened to that funny guy who was full of life?!" 

Wasssup Whatsapp ?!

A year ago before Whatsapp was in the US news as a billion dollar aquisition, my co-sister asked me to download the app on my iPhone. Apparently it was a big hit with her parents and their side of the family. They described it as a Venn diagram with multiple circles and how easy it was to communicate through that with wifi without getting charged for texts etc. etc.

Promptly paid a modest $ for the app and downloaded it. Then it got interesting. The phone was buzzing non stop with messages that were more like FB status updates and likes. 

In the US the order of priority is Email, Phone call, Text or Phone call, email text depending on who you talk to. The logic being this.. If you want to reach out to someone you can call someone and leave a voicemail. You can also email them if they are at office. However if they are in a meeting and they cannot talk to you and they are using their computer, you can always text them. 

In fact over the course of years, we used to text co-workers while on conference calls as a "strategy" of sorts. 

Whatsapp somehow disrupted that priority order by treating messages as texts. So there is no separating the wheat from the chaff. 

So I dropped off from Whatsapp. Well my father-in-law whose name was actually the group in Whatsapp quit it himself because he realized that the constant ringing was not good for his sleep. Between US, India and Australia, it is always evening somewhere but that disrupts your sleep.

Recently though, Whatsapp became a necessity of sorts, only because the folks we needed to reach were using that instead of Facebook or gmail. The app was put to good use in India, but the minute we came back here, turned it off again. 

When you get a ring that is sending you some advertisement or quote from some famous person, even if it is Emeril Lagasse, it can be annoying at 3AM.  

Apparently, I have the concept all wrong. One has to treat it like email. Set it to sleep in the night and open it just like FB and respond when you feel like it. 

That said, this novice is still figuring it out. I still dont see what all the hoopla is about given we have Facebook already and our internet connection screams and the data plan is good enough to get texts and updates on FB or gmail where we are. Guessing it is a bigger deal in places where internet plans are not that great or data plans are expensive. 

Maybe using Whastsapp will bring me into different circles in the Venn diagram!

If you have added me to this thing recently, please bear with me as I figure it out over time...