Sing My Ride

After getting into his Auto Rickshaw, Abdul Azeem started his vehicle and began to sing to himself. He was really pleasant to my ears. I requested him to start singing from the beginning and took his permission to video graph his singing.He completed the Kishore Kumar hit and reached my destination. While paying him he shared that he had contested in #ZeeSaReGaMaPa. Alhumdillah

Sartorial Splendour

This is what these final year MBA students at #presidencyuniversitybangalore did. They got a dress code , tailored to attend their farewell. I am glad I could capture this moment of 'sartorial splendour'.

When the Oil meets the Milk

The spiritual promotional feature in today’s TOI ‘The Speaking Tree’ carried a half page advertisement with a trial pouch. The ‘tree’ spoke of coconut, call it a fruit, drupe or a nut. It offers the best of both, oil and milk, nourishment and moisturizer for the hair. And if you apply the content from the sample of Parachute Advansed Coconut Crème Oil and post your picture you may feature in their Facebook cover page. When oil meets the milk, oiling gets re-invented. This is ‘Oil Ka Naya Style’.

Trick or Treat

This evening the children in our neighbourhood kept us busy by ringing our door bell and telling us “Trick or treat”. They came in batches. Some 30 of them. I had to rush out and get some candies to ‘treat’ them, or else, one never knows what kind of ‘trick’ they had in mind for us. It seems Halloween has traveled from the West and become a pre-Diwali fun game for our children too.

Met Fuad in the market in Bengaluru

Whenever I saw a new Indian face in Khartoum I used to greet him and include him in my mailing list of ‘Indians in Sudan’. This helped me to build a good networking with the Indian community, be it in Omdurman, Khartoum, Kassala, and Port Sudan. Now that I’m back in Bengaluru, India I have noticed a few Sudanese students in my neighbourhood. Met Fuad in the morning on a Sunday at the market. We both were buying vegetables. He was surprised to hear me speak Arabic with a Sudanese dialect and know that I had spent 15 years in his motherland.

Durga Pujas in Bengaluru 2018

The last Durga Puja that I had seen in India was 15 years back. So there was a special excitement in me this year. In 2002 there were very few Durga Puja pandals in Bangalore but someone said that this year the number was 125. Durga Puja is a festival and cultural programs are part of it. This also includes traditional drumming and prayer dance at the pandal. Here is a glimpse of the idols made in Bengaluru.

Disruptive Innovation

To build my ‘ecosystem’ in Bangalore after having lived in Sudan for 15 years, I am groping with ‘start-ups’, their ‘disruptions’ with ‘algorithms’ and ‘analytics’ of ‘footfalls’. The word ‘disruptive’ is no more troublesome but ‘innovative’.