Mantralaya - online travel planning, bungling and managing

Decided to travel to Mantralaya in the recent long weekend, at a very short notice. Ended up doing all planning online with "no" real inputs, the trip was great, but for a few surprises.

First step was to book a hotel room at Mantralaya, there were none available. Trip Advisor, helpfully showed some hotels in Kurnool as alternative, seemed a bit far. Google maps showed an optional route to Mantralaya through Kurnool, so thought it should be OK. Trip Advisor also showed few interesting tourist spots at Kurnool, the first on the list was the Belum caves, looked interesting so booked.

We started at about 9 am on 2nd October and reached Kurnool at about 1:30 pm, on enquiring about the caves we figured that it is about 180 kms away! This attraction being listed at the top on the website gave the impression that it was close to the city, my mistake on not checking the distance (or asking friends).

But we visited the Jogulamba temple about 30 kms away on the banks of Tungabhadra. The route was totally deserted, but for our vehicle on the road. There was a cluster of factories on the way, with lot of trucks, the road was not that great, but the temple was good. See a video of the temple and river:

Next surprise was the route to Mantralaya, we did ask about the time to travel, we heard that it is two and half hours as it is 100 kms, but google maps showed 72.5 km only. We started at about 9:30 am on Saturday morning, we followed google maps, then we figured the difference. The route we took had few stretches of a few kms of dirt track, very difficult to drive, but we made it. Had noticed at least three cars on the highway to Kurnool with flat tyres, that was a worry, as the spare tyre is with a side wall puncture fixed. Fortunately, we did not have any flat tyre in our journey.

Mantralaya was good, see the pictures by clicking on the photo to the right. Visited the Panchamukhi  temple near by, smarter by now we used common sense and took the better looking road over what google maps recommended.

We exercised the same caution on way back to Bangalore, that is still we hit the highway. We saw lot of greenery on the road, lots of cattles too. One amazing site was hundreds of goats in a single flock, see video of the flock here:


The trip was very relaxing, in spite of a lot of driving. Next trip will use google maps in conjunction with inputs from friends and will cross check too.

Mobile App for Car Servicing...

I gave my Hyundai car for the first paid servicing last Friday, the 21st of November. One difference I noticed was that the service advisor took me to computer screen and looked up details of my car servicing. Using that he provided me the list of the work to be done and the approximate costs. He told what all needs to be done, including scheduled changes of consumables (oil, coolant) and parts (spark plugs). In the past they would give a list, and would confirm over a call later, after looking up the info in their computers. At times a spark plug change would be needed as per schedule, but it could have been done in an earlier visit.

In the evening when I went to collect my car, I found a small card in the lounge, which advertized an App! It said that one can get their car service info using this app. I remembered that in the past, I could see the details of my car serving online, by logging into the dealer website. I happened to do so accidentally trying to look for a car accessory and it's availability.

I made note and decided to give it a try. I installed this app just now, had to register giving my phone number and a crazy 17 digit alphanumeric code, called VIN, which it helpfully told me is available in the RC book.

Location of service stations		Options of the App

And lo behold, I had the app and all details of my car service history. There are quite a few other options - including labor estimates, reminders, locations of service station with directions and time. It also has a trip utility etc, which I am still to explore. It's a bit too much, but that's where we are headed to.

A word of caution, the App seeks far too many permissions, which I accepted, need to review and see if I am OK with it.

Beat the traffic using narrow roads and mobile navigation

I was working in my office in Jayanagar 1st block and planned to pick up my wife from Prof CNR Circle on the way back home. I wanted to start by 4:30 pm to beat the traffic.

As usual doing last minute mails, wrap up, set the clock to just past 5 pm. My regular route is through Double Road and Sankey Road, broad divided roads, but chock o block with traffic. At times it has taken close to two hours for this stretch, if the start time was after 5 pm.

I decided to try out navigation using my mobile. The maps seem to have latest traffic data, see my old post. I got two options:
- via Sankey Road, estimated 45 min in current traffic
- via Sampige Road, estimated 38 min in current traffic.

I decided to take the latter and it was truly amazing. I went on roads that I have never traveled before in my thirty years stay at Bangalore. There were quite a few turns, which I could not have figured out, without the navigation app.

The route took me past Ashoka Pillar (which to me seems opposite of where I wanted to go), on to KR Road, to Chamrajpet, in front of the City Railway station, through Srirampuram, behind Mantri mall and the road joined the familar 4th Main of Malleshwaram.

I am familiar with Malleshwaram, but have never driven staight on 4th Main crossing the 5th Cross into the area where I was emerging from now!

If someone had suggested that I take the route which touches City Railway station, I would surely have rejected that. Fortunately, I did not study the route before starting.

At times I was wondering, if the directions were to another unit of the PSU I was headed too. Some of the roads, specially in Sriramapuram were narrow, with BMTC buses plying. What took the cake was a cow, peacfully chewing the cud, blocking at least one fourth of the road.

It did take slightly longer than the estimated 38 minutes, but definitely it took less time.

I prefer to study maps, chart out the route by myself, and not rely on technology so much. But on this ride, it finally dawned on me that one has to rely on technology. There is no way one can be aware of the live traffic and alternate routes to beat that..

I had checked this route the other way before, the Sankey Road option comes up with lesser estimated time, which is what I always use. One difference is that I take this route mostly early in the morning, where this broad road with dividers has plenty of space to clip.

Google maps has "updated" traffic info.. discovered while stuck in traffic

This was a chance discovery.

Yesterday we had to pay a condolence visit for a elderly relative who had passed away. The residence was in Ramesh Nagar. We reached there by about 8:15 pm. It was raining quite heavily.

After paying our last respectsm we started back at about 10 pm. We wanted to take an alternate route and used google maps to get that route. We were advised to take the Old Airport road route as it was late in the night. We started and hit the Old Airport road.

The traffic towards city was stalled, I thought being so late it will get cleared. But it was not, it took us about two hours to get home. It was one of those rainy days and parts of Old Airport road were flooded.

I suddenly recollected that the google map, I had searched for the alternate route, was showing parts of the road in red color (see image), which indicates heavy traffic. I pulled out the phone and looked at the map. We could see that the almost the entire stretch till Old Airport was red, it took us a long time, almost one and half hour to cover this stretch.

The route after the old airport did not have much red and we could cover that stretch quickly.

I had noticed that google maps gives alternate routes with indicative time difference, which I had used to make it to meetings just in time in the past. But it was a surpise that this info was up to date so late in the night, It is a good thing to know.

Shock neglected causes smoke

The Inverter in my home, which feeds all the lighting and fans had tripped when I came home on Thu evening. I tried to reset and it was showing fault even when I isolated it. I called up the support and they were quite helpful, had to get the serial and model number, which required hunting for torch and reading glasses. The support person waited patiently thru all this and helped me put the Inverte back in circuit and it worked. He thought it could have been an momentary fault, I was happy too.

It tripped again in night and I reset it and it was back in action.

I woke up today morning and found that the inverter had tripped. I decided to feed the home directly and investigate later. To isolate the Inverter I turned off the mains, after isolating I turned on the mains, a strange noise started in the switch box. I just happened to look at my gate and saw that one of the gate lights, which was fused and not in use for a long time was smoking! It was unnerving, I switched of the mains and called my electrician. My electrician surmised that some water must have gone in due to rain (it was raining) and causing this. He advised me to remove the lamp and tape the wire ends with insulation and also asked me if I had reversed the phase. I was supposed to reverse the phase after I got a shock and had not done that. See this post.

I removed the lamp and taped of the wire ends and switched on the mains. In the mean time my sister came and turned on the switch for the lamp just removed and again smoke! Called my electrician, he asked have you reversed the phase? I had not.

I went and looked at the wire that connects the Inverter to the home circuit, it is also used to connect directly. There were two wires - red and yellow, I would expect the red in left plug and yellow in right plug, it was reversed. I changed and tried, all was fine. I got the Inverted back in circuit and it is working since then.

Guess that the wiring to the unused lamp had some leakage, aggravated by being live all the time due to phase reversal and rain. The problem is still there, but will not show up till the switch is turned on. I did try to turn on and check, no smoke, no glow with a tester on the iron pipe having the wiring and the lamp mount, it seems OK, but will get it checked by the electrician.

The phase reversal happened when the Inverter was installed, will inform their support, as it can be quite dangerous.

Sholingur temples

Visited Sholingur temples, took the train upto Walaja (Bangalore - Chennai route), and then a cab, it took about half hour to reach the foot hills. The sign-boards have it spelt as Solingur and you don't get much info with this name on the web, but here is a link, which also has pics of the deities.

The Yoga Narasimha Swamy temple is situated on a hillock, at a height of 750 ft, there are 1305 steps. We took a little less than an hour to reach the top.

The entire steps are covered by a shade of corrugated sheets, so its just the ascent and the monkeys. We did not take any material for worship as the monkeys snatch it away, (you get a complimentary stick with purchase of the material to keep the monkeys at bay, but we decided not to). The first five hundred steps were real tiring, there was a buttermilk vendor at this point, we had buttermilk which was refreshing. With few stops at irregular intervals we reached the temple. We had to wait, as the temple was being cleaned, it was noon. We were mistaken for some VIPs and were given special treatment.

The temple has two deities - Sri Amritha Valli and Yoga Narasimha Swamy. The deities are beautiful, we offered prayers and got the theertam (holy water). One unique thing at these temples is that they splash theertam on your face, it is quite refreshing and novel, specially after the strenuous climb.

Sri Amritha Valli	Sri Yoga Narasimha Swamy

We got a generous length of flower garland as prasadam, interestingly the man gets a longer length of it than the woman. We had prasadam, which was kesaribath, puliogre and curd rice at 5/- a serving, it was a nice simple lunch. As we started back the flower garland was snatched from me by a monkey, it was very quick and gone in a flash. I have seen monkeys in different temples, but the monkeys here are different, they snatch flower garlands, thulasi garlands and water bottles. Other temples the monkeys are interested only in fruits and coconuts.

We walked down a bit fast in spite of being warned to descend slowly and that resulted in calf and shin pain. On the way down the monkey snatched flower from my friends hair too, which was a bit too much. One reason could be that being a weekday there were less devotees and the monkeys were after anything they could get.

After coming down, a 10 minute drive took us to the Anjaneya Swamy temple. This is situated on another hill at a height of 200 ft, one has to climb 500 steps. The pathway is not shaded and stretches of the path were hot, we had to run a few stretches as the stone steps were heated up, it was past noon. Fortunately, the hot stretches were not many and most of the steps were not hot due to the shade is provided by the trees on both sides. On the way a monkey came after me, I had nothing besides the water bottle so was surprised. I banged the water bottle on the steps to scare the monkey away, but it wouldn't budge. In the process the water bottle slipped from my hand and the monkey ran away with it, it was after the water bottle. The monkey opened the bottle took a swig and threw it, another monkey took the rolling bottle and wiped the bottle mouth and drank.

The climb to this temple was not so tiring, guess due to lesser number of steps and a bit of getting used to. The temple was cool and peaceful. The uniqueness of this temple is that Anjaneya Swamy is sitting in the lotus position, and this is the only temple where it is so.

Here too we had theertam and the splash of theertam. We got a thulasi garland and a length of flower garland as prasadam and we managed to get it down safely, do not know if we were able to ward of the monkeys or it was their afternoon nap time.

We again had to run through some sections, it was less as in some streches we could walk next to boundary wall where the steps has cooled a bit due to the shadow of the wall. This second ascent reduced the calf and shin pain a bit, but it came back later. It was a pleasantly exhausting trip.

Electric shock

One of my desktops would suddenly reboot and take many tries to reboot. The boot process would start and suddenly restart, if I let it be, it would reboot after a few restarts. After that it would be OK for few minutes to few hours and again restart. Was debugging this and was advised to swap SMPS from another machine, as that was the suspect and indeed it was the culprit. This exercise was tiring...

At end I was cleaning up, my laptop was plugged in to the extension/spike buster. The laptop has an US plug, so I was using an adapter, which converts the US plug into Indian plug. When I tried to unplug, the adapter opened up. I was eager to see of it could be put back together, I turned of the switch of the plug point feeding the spike buster, (did not remove the spike buster wire from socket) and tried to pull the remains of the adapter, all metal, I got a strong shock that dazed me for a few seconds! I was on squatting on bare floor, and had used only my right hand, my right arm got the shock.

I was amazed, as I had turned the switch off. I tested with a tester and found that the plug point was live even when the switch was turned off. This was not expected, I tried other plug points in my home and all were in the same state! I realized that it could have happened when I replaced my UPS with an Inverter, the installation engineers could have swapped the phase. I checked with my electrician, and he said it could be that or at times the KEB too reverses phase during repairs. I have to reverse the phase and see of all is OK.

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Quite unnerving, did some surfing and realized that if the current passes thru the heart, it can be quite grave.