Fri. Jan 26 – Driving to Delhi… and a little bit of tourism….

By Ananda Mahto | Published: March 11, 2007

Good roads really do make a difference. The drive from Jaipur to Delhi was totally painless and quick. However, it seemed to be very disconcerting to Henny, who really didn’t like all the big trucks. She actually said at one point how terrible it was, and how she would much rather take the small bumpy roads than this highway with all these 16-wheelers…. I can’t quite figure out where this emotion is coming from….


OK. I know it is a horribly blurry photo, but we were zooming by when I tried to quickly roll down the window and take this picture. This is a shot of India Gate lit up at night on Republic Day. We went and visited India Gate the following day, but the lights were only up for that night.

We first checked in to our hotel, which, while very nice in terms of cleanliness and modern-ness and whatever-else-ness, was really inconveniently located far away from central Delhi. Essentially, it was a business/conference hotel—located close to the airport and catering to those types of customers. But what can be done, right?

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Thurs. Jan 25 – Jaipur forts and shopping

By Ananda Mahto | Published: March 7, 2007

Henny wanted to know the whole time in Jaipur, how can people who built these impressive forts and who were so smart still be taken over in battle? I don’t think I was paying enough attention to the guides or reading enough of the stuff at the sites we visited to find out, but they did really build some pretty impressive forts.


View from Nahargarh Fort overlooking smoggy Jaipur….

The first place we went today was all the way up a meandering road up into the mountains. From there, we could get some beautiful views of the city—that is if the city weren’t obscured by the pollution below. Raj tried to point out where our hotel was—and I nodded confirmation though I couldn’t really tell buildings apart too much when covered in the haze of grey.

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Wed. Jan 24 – Forts and Observatories in Jaipur

By Ananda Mahto | Published: March 6, 2007

Axle’s not feeling too hot today. She seems to have a pretty horrible cough and just sounds generally groggy. I’m actually somewhat surprised that she is the first to get sick, but I don’t know if it’s a stomach thing or a chest thing. She thinks it’s just a chest thing, which may actually be more reasonable. Seeing that Henny and Karin are smoking, I guess the pollution and the dust won’t really bother them much….


We also wanted to ride a camel while we were in this part of India, but unfortunately, did’nt have any good opportunities….

We start off our adventures for the day by going to the Amber Fort. To get to the fort, we get to ride some elephants—two people per elephant. So, we have Axle and I on one elephant, Henny and the guide on another, and Amy and Karin on the third. It’s a pretty bumpy ride to the top—seems strange for royalty to pick such an uncomfortable ride, although I guess their platform would be laden with cushions and so on, right?

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Nested Lists and CSS

By Ananda Mahto | Published: March 2, 2007

I don’t use lists too often for my own stuff, but I do have to use them often either with my work or with school assignments. Often these lists can be quite long, and have many lists nested within each other.

I was recently converting an outline from a Word document to an HTML document, and I wanted different list levels to be different list-types—similar to the results you would get in MS Word when you increase the indent of a list item. However, simply nesting the lists ended up in a reverting to regular Arabic numerals, so you ended up with a list that looked something like:

1. First Level Item 1
2. First Level Item 2
    1. Second Level Item 1
    2. Second Level Item 2

while what I wanted was something like:

1. First Level Item 1
2. First Level Item 2
    I. Second Level Item 1
    II. Second Level Item 2

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Tues. Jan 23 – Where are the tigers?

By Ananda Mahto | Published: February 28, 2007

We get up extremely early and head out to find out if we have managed to get a Jeep for ourselves. After waiting for some time, we find out that Amy’s pressuring got us one, and that it would be here in a few minutes.

It’s freezing—even for me—and being in an open Jeep doesn’t really help any. Still, it’s a good adventure, and bundled in the wool blankets provided by our hotel, we venture into the forest keeping our fingers crossed that we would get to see a tiger lounging around somewhere.


Pee break… but still on the lookout for tigers….

Part of me can’t figure out how realistic the experience is. We have a driver and a guide. Every so often, they stop and listen for either a tiger’s call or the call of some other animal. A particularly still area indicates that the tiger is likely to have been in the area, and thus, has frightened the other animals away. Another telltale sign, supposedly, are the tiger footprints on the side of the road—apparently tigers like the soft sandy road better than tromping through the bushes.

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Enter the Sultan…

By Ananda Mahto | Published: February 27, 2007

So, as you can see, I’ve fallen behind on my postings of the Indian vacation by a few days. I just haven’t had time to rename, resize, and upload more photos. Part of it is the same old boring story of having a lot of work to do—especially now that CMF is getting ready to release an updated version of their brochure at the same time that we’re trying to get out another edition of the newsletter—but there is a much better reason….

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Mon. Jan 22 – Fatehpur Sikri and a bumpy ride to Ranthambore

By Ananda Mahto | Published: February 22, 2007

This morning, we found out that Mr. Lucky wouldn’t be able to join us on the rest of our trip. We had just begun to break him in! Anyway, his replacement, who went by either Bakshi or Raj, seemed to be a lot of fun from the start, so we weren’t too worried about anything.

Our ultimate destination for the day was Ranthambore, where we would be staying the night and trying to see a tiger in the forest the following day before continuing on to Jaipur.


The importance of water is evident here in Fatehpur Sikri—building these impressive buildings and plazas only to abandon them some short years later….

On the way to Ranthambore, we stopped at Fatephur Sikri—the abandoned city. Again, it was a good chance to see some pretty impressive architectural skill. We hired a guide again—Henny likes having one and it saves Amy from having to lug around our Lonely Planet all day—and he seemed to be a bit better than the guy we had at Ellora. This guide also had his “G-O-D” oversimplification, but in his case the definitions were slightly different. Nevertheless, it was amusing. He also had another saying which seemed to be enjoyed by Henny and Karin: “No hurry, no worry. No chicken, no curry.”

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Sun. Jan 21 – Agra, Agra Fort, and the Taj Mahal

By Ananda Mahto | Published: February 21, 2007

View from Agra Fort….

Just as Ajanta and Ellora was the “must see” for Axle, the Taj Mahal was the “must see” for Karin. So, after pulling in some two hours late and being greeted by our short, very tidy and courteous Sikh driver—Mr. Lucky—getting some breakfast, and checking in to our hotel, we wasted no time going out to see what Agra had in store for us.

As with yesterday, I had to take some time away from the vacation to go to school, so I skipped out on the Agra Fort. I knew I had lots of forts coming my way in Jaipur, so I didn’t feel like I was missing out on too much….

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Sat. Jan 20 – Ajanta (and studying) and a train to Agra

By Ananda Mahto | Published: February 20, 2007

There’s Ananda! At the foot of Buddha!

Although I really wanted to go to Ajanta, I had to do some homework. It turns out that my timing was off somewhere along the line and I thought I had a few more days to work on one of my assignments and it wasn’t until looking over my calendar to see what else was coming up did I realize that my assignment was actually due very soon.

I pretty much spent the day in the hotel, ordering cup after cup of coffee (well, actually, I usually just ordered two cups at a time…) and doing my work. It as a bit of an adventure in power supply since there were both scheduled and unscheduled power outages, so I found myself having to do a bit of manual writing instead of typing…. Oh, the horror!!! (At least I now know that my penmanship hasn’t gotten as bad as I thought it would have….)

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Fri. Jan 19 – Ellora Caves

By Ananda Mahto | Published: February 19, 2007

It’s hard to consider some of these as “caves” but they really are carved into the mountain. There’s a cool story about why the main structure was carved out of the mountain rather than built like a normal building, but that’s for another day…

This day was both spectacular and—for the lack of a more eloquent phrase—spectacularly-shitty….

What made it spectacular? Well, the caves are pretty impressive. Imagine a mountain out of which dozens of caves have been carved. Some of the structures carved out were even three stories high. Imagine also that in one stretch of caves you can see some amazing sculpting representing Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions, and even for a non-religious person like myself, it was pretty impressive.

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