Bengaluru : some odd glimpses from a quick visit

Before I knew it, two days ago, I was in Bangalore, Karnataka. Or to put it in the correct flavor, in Namma Bengaluru.

Everything happened on short notice - the travel, the exploration, and the return. And here are a few apparently brief but immensely live moments when my mobile cam was put to use.

Weird.. Industries Limited

I wonder what their product line is. And unsurprisingly, the whole building is put to sale now.

This shot was taken from a moving bus, with a 5MP perfectly ordinary mobile cam, across a four-lane road and aimed at the second storey. So I am content just to get the lettering clear enough.

"Sometimes I am deeply perplexed about the life in a lake beyon- HEY ANOTHER BISCUIT!!"

A curious chaos in a less fashionable corner of the JP Park. I was lucky enough to spot this while being busy getting lost in the long and winding walkways of the park.

Few people occasionally come up with banana, biscuits etc to feed the Catfish. They come to the surface, then some get on top of the upper layer, and then a few hop further on top this, and so on. The visual is incomplete without a hint of size comparison. For simplicity, assume that each fish will span the length from your fingertip to your elbow, or larger.

I am in ur fish stall, testing the quality

Found this teenage kitten while waiting outside the local fish stall. It is curious how such a furry-tailed, perfectly blue-eyed, snow white got into this place. She is the unique one among the other typical cats inhabiting the place, also due to her innocent behaviour.

The kitten would run away from everyone, apparently due to the kicking and beating it had to endure from them. This close snap took a lot of patience, and love.


More fun things  
The first snap reminds me of  this comic from Iyer Matter.
There were more fun times in BMTC, but without photos. This collection of articles by Geetanjali Chitnis is a nice summary of traveling in BMTC.

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A Very Simple Game 2 - Walkthrough

A Very Simple Game 2: Odd one out was published earlier this year, in July. Check out the game if you haven't done so yet!

Here is a game guide that will give you some really helpful hints to get through the colorful levels (And a few rather unhelpful comments from the game creator).

Level 1 | Mr.Happy

 

As we all know, this level is a no-brainer. All the smileys are supposed to be happy. So just click on the sad one already.

Level 2 | Dumber

The game is still going on easy terms. All the smileys look alike and are constantly jumping. Of course, except one. And that's the one you need to click.

Level 3 | Frenzy Blu

Although designed to be fairly easy, a fraction of the players seems to get stuck at this one. As the level angel says, "The Dots can deceive you". That's a pretty direct hint. Look closely and you will find that one smiley has an extra dot on its head. That's the chosen one!

Level 4 | Devil

Okay things just started getting a bit scary. This level was intuitively simple to some and impossibly difficult to some others. Hm, human perception is a pretty complicated thing. Well, go through the jumping smileys and you will see that one of them is jumping out of sync with the others. Spot-it and click-it!

Level 5 | Black Lescivia

A Very Simple Game, the first one, had only one female character. So I decided to add one more to AVSG2. But I wanted something dark and seductively evil. So Lescivia was born.
Oh well, the odd one's oddity lies in the rotating symbol on her forehead. Only one of them has a symbol rotating in the opposite direction.

Level 6 | Sad Ol' Chocolate

The sad brown guy from AVSG was too simple to get through. To make things interesting the circular mazes were summoned in AVSG2. Obviously the difference lies in the rotating circular mazes on their foreheads. The exact difference is not obvious though. The difference will be easily found if you compare the two innermost circles in each maze. Other than that, the level does require some effort to your eyes.

Level 7 |Marvin the paranoid android

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wonderful series of novels, the experience of it as magical as Harry Potter (or so I *think ;)). This level originally had a nerdy character, one with big round glasses. But then Marvin's concept suddenly seemed much more appropriate.
The level presents a variety of possibilities for the difference factor. After wasting your time on all the things happening there, try to figure out the one which never stops jumping. I'd click on that one if I were you.

 Level 8 | Daisy

There is something for everyone in AVSG2! So here comes the pink, flowery, girly one. Observe the band of flowers on their head. In one band, the flowers have more number of petals than the others. That's the One for you :)

Level 9 | Party Purple

Yes, so much light effects and confusion in this level. But finding that "slightest makeover" that distinguishes the odd one is fairly simple. That is, when you know that difference lies in their sideburns.

Level 10 | The Thinker

When the level was designed, there were two kinds of particles - thoughts and memories. Thoughts are white, and memories are orange, "colored in their essence". The Thinkers periodically emits their thoughts into the air, as you may observe. One of them also emits a few memories then and now. Find the one grudged by his memories!

So that's it! Complete Level 10 and enjoy the special end credits. Hope you enjoy the game!

Again, the game can be reached here.

Things you might be interested in:

You want to try the first one - A Very Simple Game, won't you now?
And no worries, one of the players has already made a walkthrough for the game!.

Another puzzling game you'd like to try is The Game of Marienbad.
No game guides this time, use your brains! ;)

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Returnin'

I kind of like the feel of return journeys.

It is often the case that departure is sorrowful with the silent pain of having to call it a day and leave the celebration. But there is also a certain calmness in retracing our path back home, with memories so fresh that they are still bubbling all around in our heart. This feeling of peace is what I like about it. Our mind is filled with new experiences, and they are being carefully placed in little drawers inside; there are laughs, moments of fascination, may be a few disappointments. Nevertheless I just like return journeys in a special way.

The most recent of such departures was from a short stay at Cochin - a popular city in Kerala, the Queen of Arabian Sea, yet my first visit to it. If you walk around the Marine Drive or MG road, you'll find a bunch of street vendors with a great collection of books. Yay, that's all the shopping I need! After brief walks through the city streets, its seaside walkway, and all the crowd, I had rushed for the last train back home. In a calm return journey, a good book is such a great luxury. I had Haruki Murakami's After Dark. It is a nice book to get lost in. The events occur after midnight and all through the very early hours of morning. So the characters are essentially in a state of caffeinated consciousness.
The book has been my traveling buddy for the two days. It became more interesting as I noticed how the passage I read at any moment would somehow relate to my surroundings - sometimes it vaguely described the people I met and sometimes it related to my state of mind. It could be that I was too immersed in the world inside the book, or it could be simply the talent of this Japanese author.

As the evening moved to it's end the sky showed more shades of colors among the clouds. It was, indeed, beautiful and all but also very subtle that it made me think that artists are often exaggerating the nature's palette when they make long strokes of intense colors across the canvas. A few minutes later pretty long strokes of intense reds and yellows were dabbled across the sky and the trees became neat stark silhouettes in the foreground. Then I was left with the impression that nature is exaggerating a bit regarding sunset colors.

The train compartment had all the seats facing a single direction - like in a bus - instead of the more common facing-each-other type orientation. Also, all these seats were facing a direction opposite to the train's movement! So all of us in that compartment were sitting there and moving backwards, together. My mind half carried way in the world of the book, yet conscious that I was traveling backwards in great speed, picking up a peanut once in a while from the paper cone in one hand, vaguely absorbing the soft instrumental music from somebody's cellphone playing in the background, I even managed to pay part of the attention to the cold breeze whooshing past the window seat.

A few of the familiar characters appeared once in a while going through their usual routine, either singing songs wearing their shades or persuading us to buy lotteries or giving a detailed account of how they got attacked by an elephant and why we should help. People also went through their usual routine, listening to these characters for a moment and then resuming whatever they were doing a moment ago.

*   *   *

A couple of days ago I went to the beach. It was unusually lonely. Since it is officially the longest driving beach in the whole country and justifyingly pretty long, being the single person standing within a few hundred meters of the shore feels considerably isolated. Then I noticed I wasn't exactly alone. There was a great number of sea creatures around. Starfish lying awkwardly face down in muddy sand, oval shaped pink crabs, bigger ones in their long winding shells, and smaller ones rolling around with the waves in their decorated shells. And me, standing amidst all of this lively situation.

That's life. The weirdness never seizes.

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