It must have been a while since I wrote 2 posts on consecutive days! Here is part 2 of my Jamshedpur trip highlights.
We went to Bistupur main road a couple of times. This is the Brigade Road of Jamshedpur. Pretty neat.
We were looking for a vegetarian restaurant and were directed to one on Bistupur main road (where else?). This happened to be the place known for South Indian food. However, the restaurant seemed to be run by a North Indian, hence we decided to do what I have learnt over the years: Eat the local food. By the time we got rotis and subji on our table, we looked around the hall and saw everyone... I mean literally every single customer in the restaurant... including the locals, sardars, huge families... was eating dosa. Wow, I am sure the restaurant staff were laughing their guts out because we ordered rotis in that restaurant. We too quickly corrected ourselves and switched to a dosa.
Oh, by the way, we were in Jamshedpur because we were visiting NIT Jamshedpur. It seemed like any other NIT that I have visited. Pretty good facilities, pretty good students, good experience. What surprised me was how far from the main road was this place. It seemed to be connected to the main road by narrow and bad roads. This being a pretty old institution, I am not sure why they did not build it closer to the main roads or provided wide enough roads. I suspect the roads were wide, but were encroached upon over the years.
On the day we were leaving Jharkhand, our train was at 6:15AM. When we came out of the hotel at 5:30, we were surprised to see the amount of sunlight. We had gone more northwards and eastwards from Bangalore and it was the summer in Northern hemisphere, so I was expecting early sunrise. However, I was surprised to see the number of people already on the road. The town seemed to be more active at 5:30 than Bangalore is at 7AM.
Our return journey was in a train, so we were not going to experience the roads again. A couple of things in the train reminded us again about the amount of impact naxals have in this area. As we entered our coach, we saw a commando - in full gear with a machine gun, strolling in it. Later, as the train passed through a certain area, they closed and locked all doors from inside and pulled down all the window shutters. Wow!
After watching more paddy fields, we were back in Kolkata.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Jharkhand! (Part 1)
Recently, I got an opportunity to visit Jamshedpur. No, I am not writing a travelogue. That is the domain of guys like this. My expertise lie elsewhere. I am not sure exactly where, though. Hence I will just jot down some of the interesting things that happened in this trip in a systematic fashion that I call 'random'.
This was my first time ever in Jharkhand or undivided Bihar. There were 3 of us. We took a cab from Kolkata to Jamshedpur. It was an air-conditioned Toyota Innova, so we did not get to 'experience' Kolkata as such. I had seen the city before, but the folks with me kept saying the whole city looks like it is covered with soot... everything was of dull grey without much other color or shine. I know the reasons for this: 1) We were passing through the old part of the city 2) Kolkata's proximity to the sea. It is not easy to maintain the external paint of buildings in this weather.
The road we took - the highway to Mumbai was in excellent shape. However, good things can't last. We took a deviation from the highway near Kharagpur (of IIT fame) towards Jamshedpur. I have a big suspicion that at this stage our Innova somehow launched into space and landed on the moon. The 'national highway' that we were on had no resemblance whatsoever to the national highway we were on until then. The ideal vehicle for this road was not an Innova but a hovercraft.
Throughout our 6 hour journey, every single piece of agricultural land we saw on the sides of the road had paddy cultivated in it. We literally did not see a single other crop anywhere on the way. How's that?
We passed through a few villages, but we hardly saw any shops selling condiments. This is unlike the South India, where you can find a shop selling Kurkure, Bisleri and Pepsi even in smallest villages on the highway.
We saw a huge number of those long trucks carrying industrial produces, most of them steel products. Surprisingly, a disproportionately large number of them were Nagaland registered (NL). Yes, I have a habit of observing vehicle registration plates. Most of these trucks were carrying railway axles. There must some reason to Nagaland trucks plying on Jharkhand roads, like tax benefits, unless the railways are planning major rail network explansion in Nagaland. That would be fun, though. Trains on mountains, more locations to shoot songs like Chaiya Chaiya.
The only English newspaper easily available in Jamshedpur was "The Telegraph". Well, I know this is a historic, great newspaper and all, but I never thought this would be so popular in this state. In Kolkata, I can understand...
The Telegraph told us why the national highways were in the stage they were. Money had been approved for repairing them, tenders had been called multiple times, but nobody had placed a bid. This is because the naxals don't let any road repair work happen at all. We now quickly linked naxals to absense of condiment stores along the highway as well.
The public are not far too behind. Bus service between Ranchi (yeah, Dhoni's) and Jamshedpur was in dire conditions because of non-co-operation of general public. Bad condition of the roads and naxals only added to the trouble.
Parts of Jamshedpur are maintained by the tatas (Tatanagar) and the rest of the urban local body (municipality?) Tatanagar is a huge contrast to everything else we saw in Jharkhand. We saw the "Jubilee Park", which I must admit is one of the best maintained parks I have seen in a while.
Wow, I have written a lot! I never thought I would write so much. I have some more. In Part 2.
This was my first time ever in Jharkhand or undivided Bihar. There were 3 of us. We took a cab from Kolkata to Jamshedpur. It was an air-conditioned Toyota Innova, so we did not get to 'experience' Kolkata as such. I had seen the city before, but the folks with me kept saying the whole city looks like it is covered with soot... everything was of dull grey without much other color or shine. I know the reasons for this: 1) We were passing through the old part of the city 2) Kolkata's proximity to the sea. It is not easy to maintain the external paint of buildings in this weather.
The road we took - the highway to Mumbai was in excellent shape. However, good things can't last. We took a deviation from the highway near Kharagpur (of IIT fame) towards Jamshedpur. I have a big suspicion that at this stage our Innova somehow launched into space and landed on the moon. The 'national highway' that we were on had no resemblance whatsoever to the national highway we were on until then. The ideal vehicle for this road was not an Innova but a hovercraft.
Throughout our 6 hour journey, every single piece of agricultural land we saw on the sides of the road had paddy cultivated in it. We literally did not see a single other crop anywhere on the way. How's that?
We passed through a few villages, but we hardly saw any shops selling condiments. This is unlike the South India, where you can find a shop selling Kurkure, Bisleri and Pepsi even in smallest villages on the highway.
We saw a huge number of those long trucks carrying industrial produces, most of them steel products. Surprisingly, a disproportionately large number of them were Nagaland registered (NL). Yes, I have a habit of observing vehicle registration plates. Most of these trucks were carrying railway axles. There must some reason to Nagaland trucks plying on Jharkhand roads, like tax benefits, unless the railways are planning major rail network explansion in Nagaland. That would be fun, though. Trains on mountains, more locations to shoot songs like Chaiya Chaiya.
The only English newspaper easily available in Jamshedpur was "The Telegraph". Well, I know this is a historic, great newspaper and all, but I never thought this would be so popular in this state. In Kolkata, I can understand...
The Telegraph told us why the national highways were in the stage they were. Money had been approved for repairing them, tenders had been called multiple times, but nobody had placed a bid. This is because the naxals don't let any road repair work happen at all. We now quickly linked naxals to absense of condiment stores along the highway as well.
The public are not far too behind. Bus service between Ranchi (yeah, Dhoni's) and Jamshedpur was in dire conditions because of non-co-operation of general public. Bad condition of the roads and naxals only added to the trouble.
Parts of Jamshedpur are maintained by the tatas (Tatanagar) and the rest of the urban local body (municipality?) Tatanagar is a huge contrast to everything else we saw in Jharkhand. We saw the "Jubilee Park", which I must admit is one of the best maintained parks I have seen in a while.
Wow, I have written a lot! I never thought I would write so much. I have some more. In Part 2.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
KDE hack
Everyone's needs from a Linux desktop is different from others. Hence each desktop is configured in a unique way. I have a couple of strange needs from my desktop, so mine is 'different' in it's own way.
I am a GNOME convert. However, there are some KDE apps I still like. For example, I use Kmail for my mails. Hence I install both KDE and GNOME on my system, but run GNOME as the default desktop. When I click on a web link in kmail, I want it to open in Firefox. However, by default kmail opens web links in Konqueror. This is because it uses KDE's default settings. So what I do is I go to KDE's control center and set the default application for html to be Firefox. This fixes the problem. Or it did all these days.
On My new Fedora 9 desktop, the above trick did not work. I suspect KDE4 that is shipped with Fedora9 does not like Firefox. I ensured that my GNOME
settings too make Firefox the default web browser, but web links still kept opening in Konqueror. I googled, but only found references to things I
had already tried.
Can I just remove konqueror from my system, since I don't use it anyway? Well, no. It is part of kdebase rpm. So it looks like Konqueror is closely tied to KDE. Hmm.. can I remove the konqueror binary from /usr/bin? When I did that, kmail did not open the weblinks at all. I suspect it reported an error somewhere that it could not find the browser, but it said nothing directly to me through an error window! Next, I wanted to find out how kmail finds out the browser application. After straceing and ltraceing kde binaries running on my system, I had found nothing.
That's when Srikar reminded me of an old trick in the bag. Replace /usr/bin/konqueror with a symlink to /usr/bin/firefox :) This of course worked as expected. I know it is a horrible hack. It must have broken a few things in the KDE desktop. However, I don't use KDE as the desktop. I just need apps. Hence, it works for me :)
I am a GNOME convert. However, there are some KDE apps I still like. For example, I use Kmail for my mails. Hence I install both KDE and GNOME on my system, but run GNOME as the default desktop. When I click on a web link in kmail, I want it to open in Firefox. However, by default kmail opens web links in Konqueror. This is because it uses KDE's default settings. So what I do is I go to KDE's control center and set the default application for html to be Firefox. This fixes the problem. Or it did all these days.
On My new Fedora 9 desktop, the above trick did not work. I suspect KDE4 that is shipped with Fedora9 does not like Firefox. I ensured that my GNOME
settings too make Firefox the default web browser, but web links still kept opening in Konqueror. I googled, but only found references to things I
had already tried.
Can I just remove konqueror from my system, since I don't use it anyway? Well, no. It is part of kdebase rpm. So it looks like Konqueror is closely tied to KDE. Hmm.. can I remove the konqueror binary from /usr/bin? When I did that, kmail did not open the weblinks at all. I suspect it reported an error somewhere that it could not find the browser, but it said nothing directly to me through an error window! Next, I wanted to find out how kmail finds out the browser application. After straceing and ltraceing kde binaries running on my system, I had found nothing.
That's when Srikar reminded me of an old trick in the bag. Replace /usr/bin/konqueror with a symlink to /usr/bin/firefox :) This of course worked as expected. I know it is a horrible hack. It must have broken a few things in the KDE desktop. However, I don't use KDE as the desktop. I just need apps. Hence, it works for me :)
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