Narmada valley -> Sardar Sarovar

Just an FYI,

One of my friends forwarded me the video shot quite recently in the villlages of Madhya Pradesh, highlighting the issues of the Sardar sarovar. So propogating

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5886389293209844888

Can yu identify the movie from the tag line

For past some time I have started developing keen interest in branding and taglines. Like someone trying to explain me the power of branding gave me example of Reliance and Tata. Reliance always gives some kind of erky feeling, whereas somehow people seem to have lot of respect for House of Tatas.

So what I thought was put some movie taglines, and give it as a challenge to identify the movie. After all movies also need branding,

Note1: All are english movies
Note2: You can ofcourse not use google
So here we go. In bracket have tried to give some clue.

1. The adventure 65 million in the making (This is a easy start)
   
2. We have always believed we weren't alone, on July 4th we wish we were (also a giveaway)
   
3. The greatest fairy tale never told (remember it is never and not ever)
   
4. Moving at the speed of light we are bound to collide with each other (if you observe posters carefully you should not have any problem in guessing this)
   
5. Love is a force of nature (little difficult, but very recent movie)
   
6. They are already here (famous movie)
   
7. something has survived (relatively easy)
   
8. In the world where nothing is what it seems you have to look beyond (tag lines tells something about the movie)
   
9. Every man dies not every man really lives (senti type movie as it appears from the tagline)
10. Believe the Unbelievable (well this is very famous movie)
    

Most of them are very famous movies, I am not a movie buff but I have seen six of them.

Will put the answers in the next post.

Disclaimer: Most of the above movies are very famous and they have more than one tag line, have just put the one which I thought best describes it.

Innovative Business Idea ->2

When I wrote the first post of Innovative business Idea, I was wondering if I would be able to dig out anything else to post on this topic, but I did not have to wait long.

Well today story is about these IITD graduates who have started a service itasveer (http://www.itasveer.com) where you can upload your photographs and order prints to be sent to any address in India at a very cheap price. The charges are really cheap, with shipping charges less than $1 and each 4"x6" print costing around 10 cents (introductory price). I think it is a great opportunity for people abroad to share the photographs with their families in India.

I also remember something of the similar sort started by some IITB graduates. But I dont remember their venture name.

You can propogate this information and help this guys :D

TravelLog Karwar

When we decided to go to karwar in mid-april everyone was like, it would be hot. But thanks to one of my friends who was very adament that we have to go to karwar that we finally decided to go to karwar. And we realized that it was not at all a bad option.

Karwar is such a beautiful place. The best thing about karwar beach is that it is very clean. The town itself is kind of laid back in time. You see lot of this very old and huge houses, nice and beautiful. It is surrounded by this small hills, with lot of trees around. There are trees even along the beach, where you can just lie down at look at the sea. Apparently Rabindranath Tagore wrote his first poem sitting on this beach.

So next time if you are planning to go to goa you may as well consider dropping down to this place for a day or two. Below am just going to jot down somethings about karwar which you may find it useful if you decide to do.

The above picture taken just after the sunset. The thing you should note is how clean the beach is.

Where is Karwar?

Karwar is in the northern part of karnataka on the west coast of India. It is about 150kms below goa.

How to go?
Karwar is very well connected by road. For people in south, any bus going to goa will go via karwar. From bangalore you have about 3-4 Busses running everyday. It is about 12 hours road journey from bangalore.

Sunrise

When to go?

We found the atmostphere very plesant in April, (or probably we were just lucky to get cloudy sky). I guess winter should be the best time tog go. But the advantage of going in aprils is that there is no crowd. There is a festival in Karwar called Karavalli sometime in feb. You could even try your luck then.

Where to Stay?

Karwar not being such a big tourist destination there are very few hotels, But we managed to find one good hotel, called Sai International. Phone: (08382-229956/08382-229957). This is quite close to the beach. (Actually everything in karwar is close to the beach, there is one main road, running parallel beach, and most of the shops, hotels are onthat road.).

View from top of light house

What to do?
Apart from playing around on the beach most of the time, what other thing we did was to make friends with some fisherman. They took us around for a ride in their boat in the sea. You can see lot of ships parked(anchored) in the sea. We had good time looking at the ships from up close from the boat. You get a very good perspective of the size of ship when you see from a small fisherman boat. Even the small ships are huge.

One other interesting thing that happened was we going to lighthouse. In karwar lighthouse is loacated on an island which is 10 kms from the mainland. We went there again with our fisherman friends. The view from top of that is awesome. That was the high point for me of the full trip. There is sea on all four sides, with small islands scattered everywhere. I have put that pic above.

Apart from this, there is this place where river Kali meets the sea. There are little backwaters there. We walked all the way there along the beach. View and water is good.

Had we more time we would have climbled some of the small hills around karwar. To get the view from there of the sea should be good. And also would have gone the island there (called Devbaug).

You can also eat lot of sea food in karwar, but every beach town has good sea food so nothing especial about it.

We were really happy with the warmth shown by local people. These guys even taught me to catch shells, (Shells when they are living), I caught three of them on my own :). Above is the picture of all of us with fisherman, we owe a lot of fun we had in karwar to them. This fisherman has promised that next time we go there they are going to take us fishing, and probably if we are lucky we would get glimpse of some dolphins.

Innovative business idea ->1

Yesterday I was just reading about this guy called Sandeep Gajak, and he inspired me to blog about him. What has he done? Started something called a Shoe Laundry. Yes "Shoe Laundry", so next time if your adorable, expensive Nike, Reebok, adidas shoes get dirty all you have to do is to this service and they will pick up your shoes, clean it up and send them back. (This is available only in Bombay). Sandeep started his business in 2003. I dont have any figures on his prosperity but googling tells me that he gets about three lakhs revenues per month ( looks little bullish, but you never know).

But leaving everything aside, I really like the idea. You dont have to be a MBA, or an IIT engineer to figure out these things. It is such a simple day to day observation.

Hats off to this guy, for thinking, believing and executing.

Read more about shoe laundry.

Tapioca i.e. Sabudana

Today at the lunch table we were having a heated discussion as to how sabudana is made. Sabudana is quite famous in my part of India i.e Gujarat, where you make delicacies like Sabudana kheer, sabudana khicdi, sabudana halwa etc.

Googled and found out that Sabudana which is also known as Tapioca in south east Asia, is make from the roots of the cassava plant (called mogho in gujarati). The roots of this plant are shown in the adjoining figure.


These roots are dried and processed and made in to small white hard pearl like things which we call sabudana in India. (Look at the picture to the left, who dont know sabudana, will be able to map it to something which used to lie is some place in mom's kitchen)

The root is also made into flour form which is used instead of wheat in some places.


you can read if you have enthu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapioca

Happy eating :)