Lifestyle
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Dopamine - The MOTIVATIONAL chemical
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Oxytocin - The CONNECTION chemical
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Serotonin - The MOOD & ENERGY chemical
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Endorphins - The DE-STRESSING chemical
- Don’t force teenagers to wake up early. It’s counter productive
- Consider how long it takes for coffee to flush out from our body before thinking of another shot
- Lost sleep hours cannot be compensated with longer sleeps
Part 5 | Sunrise, Obavvana Kindi and the Road Home: Chitradurga to Bengaluru
This is Part 5, the final instalment of Four Mornings on the Classic 350, a five-part motorcycle journey through Karnataka that was supposed to last four days, but became five.
| Route | Story |
|---|---|
| Bengaluru → Mysore | Leaving in the Rain |
| Mysore → Madikeri | The Wrong Road Down |
| Madikeri → Hassan | Touring Is Different from Living |
| Hassan → Chitradurga | Every Turn a Question Mark |
| Chitradurga → Bengaluru | Sunrise, Obavvana Kindi and the Road Home |
I was at Chitradurga Fort at six in the morning.
The entrance procedure was unnecessarily irritating—online registration, identity details and the increasingly familiar feeling that everything in modern life somehow needs to know who you are.
Then I entered the fort.
And forgot about it.
The sun was rising.
I climbed higher through successive layers of fortification, catching the morning light over the landscape.
I’d misunderstood Chitradurga Fort before visiting it.
I had imagined a fort primarily as a defensive structure—a place built to keep enemies out and protect the rulers within.
But Chitradurga was an entire seat of power spread across the hill.
It had reservoirs and systems for self-sufficiency. Temples. Areas for exercise and recreation. Palace complexes, although much of those structures are now ruined.
And walls.
So many walls.
The deeper I went, the larger the place seemed.
Two hours wasn’t enough.
Then I reached Obavvana Kindi.
Part 4 | Every Turn a Question Mark: Hassan to Chitradurga
This is Part 4 of Four Mornings on the Classic 350, a five-part motorcycle journey through Karnataka that was supposed to last four days, but became five.
| Route | Story |
|---|---|
| Bengaluru → Mysore | Leaving in the Rain |
| Mysore → Madikeri | The Wrong Road Down |
| Madikeri → Hassan | Touring Is Different from Living |
| Hassan → Chitradurga | Every Turn a Question Mark |
| Chitradurga → Bengaluru | Sunrise, Obavvana Kindi and the Road Home |
The next morning I left Hassan using a new navigation app, Kurviger.
At first, I wondered whether that had been a mistake.
Instead of taking the obvious roads out of town, it sent me through little side streets. They were full of bumps and badly repaired cuts where utility work had been done.
Then, perhaps fifteen minutes later, the city fell away.
The roads became smooth.
The traffic disappeared.
And the ride became magnificent.
I realised I wasn’t constantly checking my mirrors anymore because almost nobody was coming up behind me.
That meant I could look around.
There were paddy fields around Hassan, then plantations and villages, and later coconut and other crops as the landscape changed towards Vani Vilas.
Not taking the highway was turning out to be the best decision of the day.
Then Kurviger offered me a shortcut.
I’d selected avoid unpaved roads.
Apparently the app and I had slightly different definitions of unpaved.
Within a minute, the road became gravel.
Then mud.
Then something that barely looked like a road at all.
I stopped near some villagers.
They looked at me with understandable curiosity. Why was this man on a loaded Royal Enfield riding into what was essentially a farm track?
They told me I shouldn’t continue. It wasn’t really a proper road.
I explained that I wasn’t lost.
I was exploring the countryside.
Their attitude immediately changed.
Oh! You’ve actually come to see the villages?
Part 3 | Touring Is Different from Living: Madikeri to Hassan
This is Part 3 of Four Mornings on the Classic 350, a five-part motorcycle journey through Karnataka that was supposed to last four days, but became five.
| Route | Story |
|---|---|
| Bengaluru → Mysore | Leaving in the Rain |
| Mysore → Madikeri | The Wrong Road Down |
| Madikeri → Hassan | Touring Is Different from Living |
| Hassan → Chitradurga | Every Turn a Question Mark |
| Chitradurga → Bengaluru | Sunrise, Obavvana Kindi and the Road Home |
This was the day when the journey really became a motorcycle tour.
The roads through the coffee country were superb: bends, greenery, plantations and relatively little traffic.
I rarely went beyond 60 km/h.
There was no reason to.
On roads like these, speed would have defeated the purpose.
Instead I began learning the motorcycle better. One lesson was particularly useful: on a bend, I needed to select the lower gear before entering the turn rather than changing down in the middle of it.
The bike was teaching me how it wanted to be ridden.
Then, between Somwarpet and Shanivarasanthe, I decided to move into smaller village road instead of the state highway.
Found a detour.
I took it.
Part 2 | The Wrong Road Down: Mysore to Madikeri
This is Part 2 of Four Mornings on the Classic 350, a five-part motorcycle journey through Karnataka that was supposed to last four days, but became five.
| Route | Story |
|---|---|
| Bengaluru → Mysore | Leaving in the Rain |
| Mysore → Madikeri | The Wrong Road Down (this post) |
| Madikeri → Hassan | Touring Is Different from Living |
| Hassan → Chitradurga | Every Turn a Question Mark |
| Chitradurga → Bengaluru | Sunrise, Obavvana Kindi and the Road Home |
One of the nicest stops of the entire trip wasn’t new at all.
Between Hunsur and Periyapatna is a Café Coffee Day that is open twenty-four hours. Strangely, I had been there twice before over perhaps the last ten years.
Now I found myself there again.
I was tired. I’d woken early, and the riding was catching up with me. The air-conditioning alone made the place feel like a refuge.
I ordered a cold Devil’s Own, sat down and stayed for perhaps thirty to forty-five minutes.
Part 1 | Leaving in the Rain: Bengaluru -> Mysore
This is Part 1 of Four Mornings on the Classic 350, a five-part motorcycle journey through South Karnataka that was supposed to last four days, but became five.
| Route | Story |
|---|---|
| Bengaluru → Mysore | Leaving in the Rain (this post) |
| Mysore → Madikeri | The Wrong Road Down |
| Madikeri → Hassan | Touring Is Different from Living |
| Hassan → Chitradurga | Every Turn a Question Mark |
| Chitradurga → Bengaluru | Sunrise, Obavvana Kindi and the Road Home |
I didn’t sleep particularly well the night before the ride.
Thunderstorms kept waking me up, and each time I heard the rain I started wondering about the trip. How waterproof was my kit really? Would everything packed on the motorcycle stay dry?
I’d packed my waterproof jacket and trousers in the pannier the previous evening. By five in the morning, it was obvious there wasn’t much point leaving them there. I put them on inside the house.
Everything else had been packed the night before. All that remained was to go downstairs, attach the luggage to the Classic 350 and leave.
At exactly 6:30, I set off.
Back in my favourite cafe.
Coding with DNA
Today saw the return of me attending the friends of imperial lectures, that I used to never miss till about 4 years ago, since 2010.
The topic was just brilliant - Designing and Writing Synthetic Genomes to Advance Biology
At one point, when the audience asked what Tom Ellis, the professor, was quiet excited about, his obvious reply was the impact of AI and in the elaboration of that he mentioned how he was looking forward to create a prompt, with context and finesse the output of an LLM that produced Genetic Sequence. That was a jaw dropping moment for me.
It was also great to see the old acquaintance of members of friends of imperial, with whom I had visited CERN back in 2010.
Visiting Imperial college always leaves me with some inspiration and excitement about the future.
A father’s past and a daughter’s imagination, sparked by 32K of memory
From Bangalore’s hand-etched circuits to RC2014 kits — a journey rewired
On the 20th of September 2025, my daughter and I spent a day at the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) in Bletchley Park for the RC2014 assembly event. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most special visits I’ve ever made to the museum—and I’ve been there countless times.
A Place That Never Loses Its Charm
My first visit to Bletchley Park was back in 2008. Tickets were just a few pounds then, and I still remember seeing the Colossus machine rebuilt and working fine. Ever since, TNMOC has been inseparable from my visits to Bletchley Park—no trip ever felt complete without stepping into those rooms filled with the hum of history.
There’s a personal thread here too. My parents and sister once stood in the middle of the World War II experience at Bletchley, a powerful reminder of how computing and codebreaking shaped the course of history. Later, during my time at Elastacloud, I visited the museum many times—sometimes for executive meetings, sometimes simply out of that enduring geeky connection.
Back to My Roots in Electronics
Two friends on a bench
A lot of thinking happened on the daily walks to this place during Covid-19. Revisiting it on a quiet evening brings back similar thoughts and experiences.
The DOSE Effect
Finished reading: The DOSE Effect by Tj Power 📚
The four chemicals:
The Grand Anaicut Canal
I had [written](Technology Shapes Society: From Kallanai to AI, A Personal Story www.linkedin.com/pulse/tec…) about how this British built canal transformed and levelled the cultural and economic scene of Kaveri delta region of Thanjavur.
Here is a picture of that canal still being used to that effect and some images from the plantation of paddy for the new season.
Cloud Mesh
The Courage to Be Happy
Finished reading: The Courage to Be Happy by Ichiro Kishimi 📚
My fav topics
Life begins from incompleteness Civilisation is a product of the need to compensate for the biological weakness of the human being, and the history of the human race is the history of triumphing over its inferiority.
How many close friends do you have You cannot talk frankly about everything with a normal friend? Why can’t you take off the mask when you are with a “normal” friend.
From an ‘Art of Being Loved’ towards an ‘Art of Loving’ It is difficult to be loved by another person. But loving another person is a task of far greater difficulty
The Courage to Be Disliked
Finished reading: The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi 📚
Some of my fav bits of wisdom from the book:
You’re the only one worrying about your appearance
Philosopher: Earlier didn’t your say, “I can’t celebrate other people’s happiness with all my heart'? You think of interpersonal relationships as competition; you perceive other people’s happiness as ‘my defeat’ and that is why you can’t celebrate it.
Overcoming the tasks that face you in life
Philosopher: The interpersonal relationships that a single individual has no choice but to confront when attempting to live as a social being - these are the life tasks. They are indeed tasks in the sense that one has no choice but to confront them. Philosopher: First, let’s look at the tasks of work. Interpersonal relationships of work have the easy-to-understand common objective of obtaining good results, so people can cooperate even if they don’t always get along, and to some extent they have not choice but to cooperate. And as long as a relationship if formed solely on the basis of work, it will go back to being a relationship with an outsider when working hours are over or one changes jobs.
How to separate tasks
Philosopher: One does not intrude on other people’s tasks. That’s all. Youth: Hmm. I don’t really get it. In the first place, how can you tell whose task it is? Philosopher: There is a simple way to tell whose task it is. Think, Who ultimately is going to receive the end result brought about by the choice that is made?
It’s a fantastic feeling to end the day by writing the journal using Hero Fountain Pen.
A KISS Wedding: A Refreshing Reminder of the Power of Simplicity
Why We Sleep
Finished reading: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker 📚
Biggest learnings:
No drone in sight this time, but next time for sure!
There is something satisfying about growing crops. Despite the complexity and uncertainty involved in it, we have farmers (with big and small farms) still farming. The pace of change in farming is also accelerating. Due to lack of labour, famers are forced to use technology to continue the endeavour. In my recent visit to my village, I heard of a business who is renting drones to be used in farms. Could not get it to see in action this time, but hoping to make use of it during next harvest. Here are some photos of the paddy fields from my recent visit.
A nursery bed in preparation of next season plantation:
The current season crop nearly ready for harvest:
The farmer - Working From Home:
