I went down (or rather up) to Thrissur, to talk at Insignia '05. I had gone there to talk about DotGNU. All my slides with the demos (IDE and VOIP client) were all packed up and placed in /slides.
Friday, I set out to Thrissur on the Shoranur passenger. I was shocked when I took a ticket because it cost just 15 INR (33 cents) for the 75 km journey. I pay twice the amount to travel the 7 km from home to office daily. But I had a faint realization of what the railways have done for India - it had made long distance travel a reality for a whole new strata of the economy. The train was a crowded slow affair - but all passenger trains are. I got to Thrissur around 9:40 AM after two hours of slow crawling and stopping at 9 stations.
The people sent to pick me up didn't expect me - they were expecting someone more serious, formal and older. But I went to the college with them in a rented car anyway. That's when the world threw me a curve ball - VSNL login servers were down in Madras (ok, Chennai). I couldn't log on or download my slides.
In black and white for some reason.
So I sort of hacked up a bunch of slides then and there, gave a barely technical talk. Walked the crowd through what was being compiled, asked them what I18N meant, what gcj was. The real problem was that the box had Linspire installed - had to get it rebooted with a Knoppix CD before I got anything useful done. Talked for 1 hour 40 minutes with just a 5 slides and 6 demos. The crowd literally ran out when I finished my talk.
I was shipped out back to Cochin at 8 PM. The Cochin International Airport is quite a sight at night, mainly because the train tracks are perpendicular to the take-off stretch. The planes literally fly over you when they take off. The landing lights are quite something to see - the lights going on till forever when it fades into the fog.
Wish I had a camera ... there were some really pretty girls down at Thrissur. And not in the Bangalore - shaped eyebrows, red lipstick and high heels - way, but in a very definitively mallu way.
--Kodak moments never happen when there's a camera handy