Mangalore:MALL Maala-MALL

I had written about the  transformation of Mangalore from an ancient port town to a cosmopolitan city. In the meantime Mangalore has kept the pace with developments and has come up with lot of infrastructure projects.

 

These are the two malls – Bharath Mall and Empire Mall - which are already a big hit among the Mangaloreans. 

       

These are the photographs of those proposed Malls which is going to make a tremendous change in the skyline of Mangalore. The first picture is of Mohthisham City Centre Mall which is coming up in K S Rao Road. The second one is Mischief Mega Mall which is also comiong up in K S Rao Road. MakMall is the third one which is being constructed in Kankanady. The fourth one is a huge Golden harvest Mall coming up in Bejai. One more called as Plama Mall is coming up in Kulshekar.

Mangalore is Maala maal with Malls.

CafeMORGAN comes out of a Magic Lantern

Back in my office, there are bunch of guys who think that the kind of job they are doing is nowhere near to creativity. Going by the rule ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY, these people have decided to do some thing creative. I always liked the company of those who used to bunk the boring classes in the college. So I was an obvious member of this team which also included a fellow movie buff Prekshak, a ‘been there done that stage artist’ Dhiraj, Sudarshan – an engineering student who wants to try his hands at editing, Alston- who is a Jack of many arts and Loyed – a friend as keen as mustard when it comes to having some fun.

It all started when Prekshaka came up with an idea of making a short movie. It seemed like a silver lining in an otherwise boring office environment. I asked him if he has any story in mind. He already had a concept. He narrated it to us which we all thought was good enough to be turned in to a short film.

I asked him to write the script. Since he was ready to produce the film besides directing it, there was no worry about the pre-production part. I was asigned the job of cinematogrpher. Loyed became the production manager. The castline of the film includes Dhiraj and Soumya Kotian in the leading roles with Frank Dantis, Loyed, Sudarshan and Alton in the leading roles. When Sudarshan heard the story by Prekshak he suggested the name for the film. ‘Cafe Morgan’ – the title was OKeyd by all of us.

When the script was ready we thought let’s keep up doing creative things like this and we decided to make a production house. Naming it as Magic Lantern was somewhat spontaneous as I had read somewhere that the prototype film projectors were called as Magic Lantern.

This is the poster of Cafe Morgan. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and wait for the film. I have given the blog address of Cafe Morgan. You can visit it and leave your feedbacks.

Note: you can visit the weblog of the fil at: http://cafemorgan.wordpress.com/

God’s own country and Kanya Kumari

At the begining of this year my friend Loyed said he wanted to take a break from office and wanted to go somewhere. This was the reason behind my sudden Kerala trip. We decided on Kerala and Kanyakumari and my cousin Raj joined us in what turned out be a week long holiday trip  from mangalore to the southern most tip of India – Kanyakumari.

We took a train from Mangalore and traversing all through the God’s own country reached the capital Thiruvananthapuram (formaerly Trivandrum). More than me it was my Aunt and Uncle who were very happy. they were insisting on my visit to their place whenever they used to come to Mangalore. We stayed in my Aunts house. The first three days we roamed only in Thiruvananthapuram. I had visited this city long back – more than 15 years back I suppose. What used to be  a traditional town has transformed into a more or less cosmopolitan city. The beaches of Kerala are very famous. Kovalam and the one near International airport is very picturesque. Kovalam is very crowded with foreigners. It looks as if this beach is a part of Goa.

Ananthapadmanabha Temple is another main attraction in the city. I think this is the biggest Hindu temple I have ever seen. (Or any building of worship of other faiths). What I liked about this temple is they have retained the culture of Kerala even to this day. The statue of Lord Anantha padmanabha is in the posture of sleeping with right hand of the idol supporing the head. The sanctum sanctorum of this temple is provided with three openings to allow the people to see the head, abdomen and legs of the Lord. It was a surprise to know that the priests of this temple are from Tulunadu (areas surrounding Mangalore – yeah that’s my town).

 What I dont like about the temples of Kerala is some of the temples are open only to Hindus. This is basically the disrespect shown by the temples of Kerala towars the fundamental philosophy of Hinduism. Hinduism believes in respecting all the religions and it says that all faiths are different paths towards understanding the life and beyond it. When it comes to descipline, temples of Tamilnadu and Kerala are way behind the temples of Karnataka. I could see the pilgrims shouting and breaking ques in these temples. Even the people serving in the temple were unfriendly; if not rude.  I think the temples of South Canara are more ordered and disciplined than any temples of other states. Temples like Dharmasthala, Udupi, Shringeri and Subramanya are not only places of worship but also the places of inter-religous harmony. I think other temple authorities should learn a lesson or two from these temples.

We visited few places like museum, zoo, shopping centre -big bazaar and a small dam near the house. It was fun roaming in the city, specially when we were speaking to the people there asking for direction in a strange language – a hybrid language we discovered with the misxture of  little Malayalam, relatively better Tamil, Kannada,  Hindi and English.

                    

After three days of roaming we left for Kanyakumari early morning . I could not come to this place when I came last time to Thiruvananthapuram. It was a journey of almost 3 hours in train. Kanyakumari Railway station is the exreme end point of the biggest railway network in the world. We took few snaps of this point and then went to the city to book a room. By the time we finished our lunch it was around 3pm. We left the room to roam in the town. That evening we did nothing but window shopping, discussing on what to buy and what not to? We went to a light house from where we could see whole of Kanyakumari. In the evening we went to a Wax statue museum, supposed to br the first of its kind in India. It was an awesome collection of Wax statues of various famous personalities – right from Amithabh Bachchan, Manmohan Singh, Jaya Lalitha, Saddam Husein to Vivekananda swami, M S Subbu Lakshmi, Jesudoss and M K Gandhi. When we came out of the museum, it was time for Sunset. we rushed to the sun set point and saw the setting of Sun into the great Ocean.

   

We started the next day with a beautiful sight of Sunrise.  The beach where we saw sun rise was over crowded with people from all over the country. That day we went to Kanya Kumari Temple, Gandhi Mandapam, Stella Maris Church and did lot of shopping. Afternoon we went to Vivekananda rock memorial and Thiruvalluvar statue. These places are away from the shore and had to be reached by a ferry. Amidst the tumultous current our ferry took us to the Rock. This is a very beautiful place. This is the place where Swami Vivekananda is believed to enlightened. I have a great respect towards the Swamiji I feel that,  if Indian philosophical heritage has to be in a human form, that would be called Swami Vivekanada. Swami Vivekananda and Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam are two great sages of Modern India and their thought will always inspire the youth of this nation.

I bought few good books from the shop in this rock and then moved to the next rock where a huge statue of Thiruvalluvar is situated. The statue is gigantic and the pedestal of the statue consists of thousands of sayings by Thiruvalluvar. He was an ancient poet of the Tamil Sangam era. His writings are more than 1500 years old and they are considered to be Tamil Vedas. Some of writings can be compared to our own  Sarvajna and Vachana poets and Haridasas.

We bought many things from Kanyakumari. Handicrafts, Decorative items, gifts made from Seashells etc. I realised the necessity of a ‘how to increase your memory session’  for me when I remembered that I had forgotten  to take the books I bought from the rock. I had kept those books in a shop while purchasing some gift items. I would not have been that upset if I had lost any gift item, but books are more than just a material. After roaming, buying and clicking pictures we came back to Trivendrum via Nagercoil and from there we came back to Mangalore.

When we took a train back to Mangalore, our booking was upgraded to two tier AC compartmaent, which added our happiness even more. Overall the trip was a great fun.