Operation Korigad

The Trek:

Korigad , 20 km from Lonavla on the Pune side. It had one of Shivaji’s forts. It was supposed to be an easy trek but the difficult part in the whole trip was to convince the bunch of guys to go there.

Anyway aginst all odds we made it last Saturday on the 23rd of July 2011 🙂

The Trekkers:

El Papa the (in- , dis- , un- )legendary El Mariachi duplicate, Uncle the ancient one , Landy the loose cracker , Nippo the doped one and of course, the crazy ol’ mental me ….

The Self-Persuasion:

This part is akin to the tumultuous and cumbersome due-diligence phase that usually precedes a merger/acquisition – lots of brain storming (not where to go or when to go but why to go ? 😛 )

If at all we had decided to go there was the question of logistics …not only the physical but also the psychological and mental (Boy! I must be making a little hill like Korigad, sound like Mt.Everest !). For die hard adventurers, it is no mean deal. It’s probably like going for a casual Sunday picnic. But for wee city lads such as the ones under current observation, psychologically preparing to move butts from Mumbai to the city’s outskirts and physically transitioning the body from a hung-over Saturday morning state to an excited Saturday-trekker state is a Herculean task.

The Car and the road trip:

Landy boy’s got a new Nissan Micra in the orange color. The car’s selling points for the trek:

• We don’t have to take a train or book a taxi to reach the base village.
• In the road trip, Landy would drive the 200KM+ distance (wouldn’t let us touch the steering wheel of his new car anyway, leaving us to blissfully get lost in dreamland)
• It is orange colored! So stands out in the monsoon fog of the Western Ghats! God bless landy’s car …truly the hero of the story!

Anyway, so there we went. The Plan was to leave at 6 AM on the 23^rd of July. Dutifully adhering to the lazily cultural and boringly traditional best practices of the Indian Standard Time, we did manage to leave not before 7:30AM.

We picked up Nippo on the way (finding the route where we had to pick up Nippo caused enough delay to give in to taking numerous smoke’n’tea breaks)

The highlight were the extra-cheese infested but totally lip-smacking burgers we managed to gobble at McDonald’s on the Mumbai-Pune highway. That was just the breakfast!

The climb

For all those who thought this was a huge killer operation with never say die shouting Rambos scaling unimaginable mental odds and physical hurdles, a colossal Hahaha at you 😀 !!!  It was a little thing, more like a walk up a hill with stairs (though the acromegalic stairs do screw your knee caps a bit)

landy - uncle - baba

landy - papa - baba

At the top, there was a fog driven hither and thither by the monsoon winds. There were other people, which motivated some of the more lecherous among our group to delve in stealthily appreciating the ladies among the other trekkers. Big bada Boom  was the little harmless CA (chick-alert ) war-cry ! Anyway, apologies for the digression …. Back to the story …

At the top, I do opine that most of the other trekkers were a mightyless bunch of in-depth pansies. Besides being on an easy trek, you don’t go around playing ringa ringa roses  on the top of a hill (boys and girls alike). So we decided to set some trends  ….true maverick macho groovy style

The trend-setting

Nippo

We took off our shirts (oblivious of contributing too much cognition  & recognition towards bellies, body hair and everything else) and jumped in the big lake on top of Korigad. Much to almost everyone’s delight (perhaps a little disgust)  that finally there was some amusing action on Korigad.

who are the men eh ??? 😀

Other strangers followed suit by jumping into the lake too…. 😉

The Return

We ate at a food court on the highway after descending the hill and driving a few miles. Some of the more lecherous among us were at it again at the food court, staring here and there, whispering big bada boom  and laughing  a**es off. And then  we hit the road again when we chanced upon the old man …

The old man

There was a car in front of us. There was an old man in the car with his family. There was a minor traffic congestion in a narrow lane. So a medium-sized queue of cars was piling up. Someone kept honking from behind much to a lot of annoyance …then it happened …

The old man in front of our car, suddenly got off his car in a fit of rage (perhaps because he wrongly thought we were the ones unnecessarily honking) and stared at us. He then noticed there were 5 buffalo-like guys (Well Landy is a  feather weight , so 4 buffalos + one baby buffalo! 😛 ) in our car. Landy made a “Aah! What !”  expression with a rooster-like swagger of his head. The old man silently went back to his car. Drove us to a state of hysteric laughter ….

So there! Harishchandragad ! You are next 😉

~Ghost Runner

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Greeting card pic from Korigad:

what exactly was stinking ?

Third front intervention – Why the IIMC-XL sports tourneys are jingoistic

DISCLAIMER:

Whatever is being written is light hearted by the most serious of any blogging rules. By no means is it to be taken seriously , unless of course, one unfortunately suffers from the most retarded versions of a disease called the ass-brain-same-position-uptightness-syndrome

THE FOUNDATION:

While thinking between how RPFs work in the banking sector and how the Ude Garami can be varied with respect to the combat position ,I was struck with an idea that was totally uncorrelated with either.

This evolution of thought , where you are seriously thinking of concluding a pondering process between two mutually exclusive thoughts, and yet conclude on something else totally devoid of any connection to either; I have no puta of an idea what such an idea should rightfully  be called. For now, I will casually call it  the third front intervening-nugget :p

THE THIRD FRONT INTERVENING NUGGET:

Ever wondered why the IIM Calcutta and XLRI annual sports tournaments are so aggressive and jingoistic ? Stupid question. I am sure you all have your answers. So do I. The stuff that doles out like ‘tournament’s competitive nature, warm blooded warring-spirit, machivellian sportiness, et al’ ! Usually, I think so too. Yet, for the dilletantish sake, I have an another (additive but not exclusive) theory…

You see this good friend of mine , always made a thought provoking…err..thought that at some point in life, perhaps for a second or perhaps for longer, everyone thinks like a communist. The egalatarian idealism perhaps appeals to a young mind who yearns to see some equality in their frame of observance.Pute ete ? Anyway, totally granted …lets park that thought for a while !

Now you see in IIM Calcutta the gender ratio has always been sad , not so for good ol’ XLRI. So, when a sports contingent from Joka (IIM Calcutta campus) goes to XLRI for a sports festival, the boys are naturally expected to be in their good boyish, prince charmingish behavior . Who knows if the Gods will it and the XL brothers are not so bothered, the Jokaites might even score 😛 This is where the communistic-correlation kicks in …

Not everyone would score. By the laws of gender dynamics and the Uncertainity principle, not necessarily! If a few do and others don’t , the remaining might feel bad, sad and not at all glad. So to make the comrades be equal, an ancient IIMC-XL culture had been invented to prevent the ladies’ stud of Joka from succeeding.

THE SOLUTION:

That of jingoistic , Indo-Pak level sports rivalry where IIMC  and XLRI are the collective personifications of two rivals, and no niceties in between please. Hence, the comrade who wanted to score, should not, because he is part of a contingent that is only following tradition, open sports-rivalry and perhaps, closet marxistic distribution of unscoring! Get it ? 😉

Yours truly,

the dark, the fast and the only,

-Ghost Runner