Chp 672. A trip to Lion's Point

"Stop being such an eccentric loner and start living life again!" the woman on the other end of the line reprimanded me.

"Huh?" was all I could respond, rubbing my eyes as I was still half asleep. It took me all of my strength just to answer that early morning phone call.

"Seriously, u Kim," she continued. "Today is Saturday, are you really going to spend the whole day just watching TV shows at your sad lonely apartment again?"

"Like I said, that's my plan for today…" I replied.

"No way. You need to start getting out more. At least get some fresh air. You can't just cut off the rest of the world because you broke up. We're on our way to your house," she said and hung up without even waiting for a reply.

Ahhh. Good old Esther. She and her boyfriend Thara had been really looking out for me. I was just about done with a hot shower when Esther, Sawma and Grace reached my apartment. It was indeed a rare occasion for me to receive guests on a Saturday morning :D

We talked and they finally convinced me to go out. We decided to go to Lion's Point at Lonavala, as I had never been there before. It is a famous tourist destination around 80 KM from Pune and although they had been there a couple of times, they were more than eager to show me the place for the first time. We booked a cab and left.

They even bought beer for me too, haha. Early morning beer, it was definitely going to be an interesting day.

On the way, we made a surprise stop at Ethel's place, asking them to join us. Ethel couldn't come with us because she had already made an appointment that afternoon. Andrew was excited and ready to join us, but one sharp dagger look from Ethel and he suddenly remembered he was busy and wouldn't be able to join us, lewlz.

Zami too was unable to come, complaining of stomach cramps due to her period. She asked us to stand on her back to relieve her pain. No way was she going to make it for the trip, and even if she did, all she would be doing was to put everybody's mood down, so it was best to stand on her back for some time and go without her.

Perhaps we were having too much fun? :D

So finally, Puia and Gosi joined us from Ethel's place and our group was on our way to Lion's Point. Woohooooo! :) Breezers for the road. We hooked up our phones to the car's music system too and blasted Mizo oldies songs, much to the amusement (or perhaps irritation) of the cab driver.

We passed the grand looking Symbiosis Skills & Open University (SSOU) situated right next to the Mumbai-Pune Expressway.

My phone was able to capture moving objects quite well. All hail the almighty Oneplus phone :P

SSOU looked truly magnificent from the expressway. The other Symbiosis buildings scattered across Pune pale compared to this.

A collection of luxurious looking apartments below.

I googled immediately and found out the above apartments are called "Belmondo", developed by reputed builders - The Lodha group. Have I mentioned before that I was once stranded in Bandra late at night during a heavy #MumbaiRains session with no auto or taxi in sight, and a very nice gentleman gave me a lift. He was an executive at Lodha.

We also passed the Maharashtra Cricket Association Stadium on our right, home of the Rising Pune Supergiants, not that I follow cricket.

Soon we started ascending to the great Western Ghats. Traffic was extremely thin for a Saturday. Maybe because we were early…

Our cab driver was amazing. He stopped the car at this point and told us this had a best view for scenic photography.

He was right. We could see the vast plains below and the hairpin bends climbing towards us (which reminded me of my Alma Mater Montfort School situated on the sprawling Shevaroy Hills of Yercaud).

He told us that many people come to watch the sunset from this location and this entire stretch of road would be packed by evening.

But then of course the sunset from Lion's Point would be even more breathtaking, and so we continued with our journey. Meanwhile Gosi was busy taking pictures and selfies, and we forgot about her and almost left her behind by mistake. :D

We passed through the main Lonavala township area, where traffic was a bit slow for some time.

On our right is the beautiful Lonavala Lake. But of course they are hidden by those pillar structures because I have no sense of photography.

Aaaaaand we reached! Super excited all of us were. It took us around 2 hours to get here from KP (3 hours actually, but we spent around an hour at Ethel's place). A group selfie to announce our arrival, lolz.

We parked at the designated area and started exploring the place on foot. The whole area was a long narrow plateau. The empty spaces that you can see below were all filled up with vehicles by evening as many folks came to watch the sunset too.

Here is me clicking a picture of this famous landmark hill that you'll see in most photographs tagged with "Lion's Point" on Google image search. I tried my best to exclude all the thrash and rubbish that were lying on the slope. Sad.

Man, that is one mountain I really wanna trek up to one of these days.

As it was still early, most of the stalls were empty. There were many makeshift snack joints around the place, with tables and chairs placed adjacent to it and one of their employees, probably the most junior one, beckoning tourists to sit at their tables. Pretty much like the Baga beach stalls of Goa :D

There were empty carnival rides for children like a mini merry-go-round and one of those manually controlled "giant wheels". They even had camel rides, which excited Puia immediately :D

We trekked up to the main viewpoint, which was around 15-20 minutes' walk.  We could have taken the cab but we decided to enjoy the surroundings with a slow promenade.

Almost there now. This area also had a couple of food stalls for customers. All the food stalls served only snacks and junk food, there were no proper restaurant serving rice meal etc. or even if there was, it wasn't open yet.

The Happies :)

Awesooome view. You can see Lonavala Lake in the far distance below (click on any image to enlarge and open on a new tab).

That same hill again :)

Very "riangs" photo. As the wise saying in Mizo goes, "Ka lo îp hmanlo hi chu a va pawi ve awwww!"

Before you judge me for wearing just an inner vest, that's an H&M vest :P Glad to know my friends from Kolkata will finally be able to shop at H&M in Kolkata soon as they are opening a new chain there. Nice.

Here's another good spot where a lot of people took photos.

We kept walking till the area where we were allowed. The place looked quite dangerous.

What surprised me was, there was not a single law enforcement person around. Some people even climbed over the barricaded bars and took photos at the extreme edge of the precipice! Well, I guess Darwin's Law could be applied here.

Us law-abiding citizens took pics only at the limit where we were legally allowed to.

Esther and Sawma with their "Please take a photo for my Facebook profile update" poses.

As you can see above, they weren't standing very close to the edge because that was like a steep 1000 feet drop below. No wonder there were no wine shops around among the food shacks area, or else there would be a lot of people daring to step closer to the edge.

We slowly moved our way up towards the commercial area… And of course it was selfie time for Gosi again…

More selfies… :D

Meanwhile, Puia had moved from his interest on the camels to this Quad bike. How quickly affections could change :D

Esther and Sawma were busy trying to take each other's picture-perfect profile-worthy pics.

And if you're thinking where Grace is all this time, here she is, braving the edge of Lion's Point with a sweet pose.

I have no idea what the plan was here, but looks like Gosi was being told to be or not to be, based on the perspective of Sawma the photographer.

We finally headed back towards the parking area as sunset time was soon approaching. We had a lot of fun along the way. Here's a frame by frame capture of my friends jumping up in joy.

Back at the parking area, we finally succumbed to the many vendors asking us to sit at their food stalls. Like I said earlier, they served only snacks, which we didn't mind.

But yeah, it was a different kinda experience seeing so many cows roaming right next to us :D

We ordered a good dose of freshly prepared hot kanda bhaji (onion pakoda), batata bhaji (potato pakoda) and cheese pakodas. The cheese pakodas were surprisingly awesome and they melted right in our mouths.

As sunset was fast approaching, the entire place was filled up with people, mainly large families with lots of pesky children running everywhere.

I didn't take a photo of the crowd, but it was YUGE. The biggest crowd ever. Bigger than Obama's inauguration crowd. And so we asked our cab driver if we could still make it to the other point we stopped at on our way.

He said he wasn't sure, but the crowd would definitely be thinner there. And so we decided to take a chance and raced against time.

Move, move, move…

Faster, faster, driverji!

I blasted the song "Chase the sun" by Planet Funk all along the way, and it was the perfect song to play. If you want to relive those days again, you can listen to it here.

Esther too was busy trying to capture the sunset from our moving cab. But of course, her pics couldn't match my Oneplus' quality :P

"Hang onnnn Sun, wait for usssss!"

The sun's reflection glistering from Lavasa lake was truly spectacular…

"Going once… going twice… going thr…"

Aaaaand this was the last photo I took as the sun vanished from our eyes :(

Sad that we couldn't make it to the viewpoint in time. But overall, it was an awesome experience, and my friends told me it's an even better place to visit during the monsoon. So this is something I definitely don't mind doing again.

A big thanks to Esther and the others for showing me a great time. Definitely much better than just sitting at home watching TV shows alone and pouting. We headed back to my apartment and woke up Thara. Poor guy had a night shift so he couldn't come with us. Instead, like a good boyfriend, he slept at my place and waited for Esther to return. They all left after that.

A wonderful experience indeed.

Until my next update, cheers everyone.

Chp 671. The Shoe Chronicles

I suck at a lot of things, but perhaps what I suck the most in life is probably my taste in shoes. I just cannot seem to have the talent or ability to judge whether a shoe looks good or not. I'm talking about Men's shoes here.

This probably stems from the fact that I've never really cared much about shoes my entire life. Even during my basketball days, I was happy wearing a simple "action" sneakers whereas my teammates (especially my Mizo teammates) were always asking their parents for the latest Air Jordans and Reebok Kamikazes.

Guess my folks were quite fortunate because of that :D

For me, a good shoe used to mean something cheap. Something that I could get at a great bargain. If I see an offer from Jabong or Myntra saying "Buy 3 shoes for just ₹ 700" you can bet your ass I would go for it!

I still remember 4 years I ago when I was in Gurgaon and Delhi on a business trip, my dear friend and fellow blogger Suzanne took me to ZARA at DLF Promenade and selected two shoes for me, just like that.

Suzanne told me my choice of shoes and sense of fashion was horrible, and that's what real friends should do. Be frank with each other. Better than just staring at my shoes in disbelief and then snickering and bitching about my "poor" taste behind my back. You can see the shoes she got for me from the link above. Those were my very first "modern" shoes :)

As the years went by, I continued buying more and more awful shoes, except for maybe 2 or 3 shoes which were selected by my ex. Those were the only good ones I had. And so recently, around two months ago, my friends here in Pune said it's high time I had an intervention.

They sat me down in a room, tied me up to a chair, surrounded me and then lectured me on the importance of having good shoes, and since I'm single again now, they said most women who meet a guy for the first time judge him by the shoes he wears! I seriously didn't know that. Is that really true?

And so we started shopping for new shoes. Thus began my shoe chronicles :P

Just to be clear, these friends of mine who intervened and volunteered to help me shop were all women and they were even more excited than I was to buy my new shoes. Amazing bunch of friends. The first shoe they selected for me was a pair of Vans Prison Issue (Twill).

At first I was like, "2500 bucks? No way, look for something below 1000 bucks or even 500 bucks". And then they gave me a tight slap on my head and after that I didn't complain about the cost again.

The second shoe they selected was a United Colors of Benetton Brown 901 sneaker.

I exclaimed in surprise, "United Colors of Benetton? I thought they make only clothes, when did they start making shoes???" I got another tight slap on my head.

After that they gave me the freedom to select the ones I like. I selected 10. They shot down all 10 immediately. Finally they asked what color I fancied, and I said I didn't have any white shoes, you know, for those days I go golfing or participate at a wine-tasting festival.

Unfortunately, they didn't see past my sarcasm and so they chose Forca by Lifestyle.

For the fourth shoe, they finally allowed me to buy what I liked. Coffee Loafers by Roadster. They kinda liked the color and were okay with the shape, hence the reason why they allowed me to buy it, though the actual reason why I liked it was because it had a unique strand of jute rope veiled around it!

Jute sack, known as "buara bag" in Mizo are used mainly to store sand and bricks. Jute is also used as a rope, so I was thinking if I was out hiking in the jungle alone and I fell in a deep pit, I could easily pull out the jute strands from this shoes and make a rope and climb out. But I didn't tell my friends that was the reason why I wanted it :)

I also bought my first formal shoes from Hush Puppies.

I always thought Hush Puppies had only women's shoes and bags. I was wrong. I even doubted my friends who were selecting the shoe for me and mistakenly asked them, "Wait, how can you know if this formal shoe for men looks good or not? You're all women" I said. "You're such a sexist!" they replied, as they slapped me on my head again. Then they turned around to the other guys in the room and asked all of them, and they all said it was a beautiful shoe.

I even bought new football shoes, because I really needed to start playing and losing weight again. I selected a Fila Men's Restart Football Boot, which was an apt name because I too was just restarting to play again.

Another shoe my friends really loved, and cursed that it wasn't available in their sizes, was this shoe from United Colors. They were hysterically exclaiming about how awesome the color was, but frankly speaking, I thought it looked like those shoes the CRPF constables used to wear during their morning jogs outside their camp (they used to jog past my house every morning).

Of course I didn't tell them that, lest I received another smack on my head :D Even other friends who saw this shoe later complimented on how beautiful the color is. I just nodded my head knowingly.

Here is one shoe they selected that I liked. Again from United Colors, a black and white striped loafer. It is extremely comfy as well, not that I'm saying the others are uncomfortable. I think I have worn this to office the most number of times from this list.

Later I selected this shoe on my own and my friends were relieved that I was finally starting to have a good sense of style. They looked at me with tears in their eyes, happy to see that their baby boy had finally grown up. They gleamed with such pride in their hearts. :P

The one I selected was this Blue Striped Sneakers from United Colors of Benetton.

The next shoe I selected was approved immediately too. It was again from United Colors of Benetton. Yeah I was starting to feel the rhythm now.

I was so glad that I started talking like a fashionista, telling them how I really love the way the blue and the brown blended together to form a surreal fashion fusion of artistic fashionism without giving away the fashion of this season's fashionic fashion.

They smacked me in the head again :D

Three months ago before going to Goa, my sister and cousin came down to Pune and selected a chappal for me to wear at Goa. It was from H&M and they really loved it, but I absolutely didn't. I even said it was "thring eee", but uh uh, everybody who saw it loved it!

Apparently, that style of sandals is "in" these days. Unfortunately, I'm not putting up a picture of it as I have worn it many times now and I didn't take a picture of it (like the ones in this post) when I bought it that time. But here is another chappal I bought recently that all my friends really love. It's from Hidesign.

My friends even said I can wear this chappal to a 5 star hotel lounge party or even at my private helicopter and it will still blend in well. Great. Now I only have to buy a helicopter. :P

I also told my friends I wanted boots, but they were against it, telling me that I would never wear it. But I pleaded and pleaded, and so finally I got these two awesome boots - A Mactree Black Boots…

…and a Buckaroo Arnaldo Brown Boots.

With that, I think I'm all set for the next couple of months. Maybe I'll buy one more shoe, a high-ankle sneaker for basketball as some of my friends play every weekend, but other than that, no more new shoes for the rest of this year. 

I think I'm finally starting to understand the value of having good shoes. And yes, I have noticed a few changes ever since I started wearing them to office… Like earlier, none of the women in our office building (comprising of seven different companies) would give me a second look, but the other day, as I was walking across the common cafeteria, I could see all the women glancing at me, some of them nudging their other female friends to look at me… of course later my colleague told me they were looking at me because my fly was wide open, which it was, but hey, it could be because of the shoes too! :D

And just the other night, my friend Zama invited me to his place for a party. He stays just one block away, but since it was raining, I didn't want to get any of my new shoes wet, so I didn't go. Hours later the cops raided his place and took everyone to lock-up. Had I been there, I would have been caught too. See, it’s all because of the new shoes. New shoes are good :)

So that is my short update for this week. In case you hadn't noticed, all the images are now hosted at my own server at AWS. I will slowly be editing my old blog posts too. Until then if you want to view a particular old post which has images disabled, kindly send me a request through mail and I'll keep that post on a higher priority.

Cheers then, happy weekend everyone.