Trekking Experience - Shivagange

What does people do on a typical Sunday????
Lazy people love to snooze. . .
Normal people love to devote time with their family...
Workaholics- love to spend at office. . .
And Crazy folks…I mean extra ordinary people. . . love to spend on a long arduous journey...
Where do I Fit in the above puzzle!?
Extra ordinary people category!?
Yup, This Sunday was my first, Fun filled, memorable expedition with 14 people of BTC. After my Palamalai(a small hill in Coimbatore) which I went with my NSS gang before 5 years, this was my second trek.
Trekking at summer!?
Yup, as I said, we are crazy people who does different things and hence we opted to trek Shivaganga hills (56kms from Bangalore) which is above 1368m above sea level on a sunny summer Sunday.
We were communicated to be in Majestic at 6.30 PM. Since, the BTC members is otherwise called perfectionist,  we all gathered at 6.45 and boarded the bus to Dobbasapete. We got down at Dobbasapete and had breakfast. A big idly, with spicy chutney. After packing our lunch, we took an auto to reach the foot hillls of Shivaganga. After clicking the snaps in front of the foot hills, we started to trek exactly at 8:49am.

Attractions:

• Olakallu Theertha -

At first, we reached Olakallu Theertha - Shiva temple a holy spring water inside the rock - It is believed that, on putting your hands into the rock, and if you are able to touch the water, your wish will be fulfilled. The entry fees was Rs. 10, since I was a special guest, I did not take the tickets ;).
By the time, I made up mind to visit temple and removed the shoes, the ticket counter guy escaped somewhere, and i dint take the tickets.

• Nandi on the boulder:

Best Part

• Lemon juice- Mixed with Pepper, salt, sugar
• Butter Milk – Mixed with lemon, salt, coriander, chilly, Manago and carrot

Challenges :
The hill is quite steep either with big steps or small cravings. Though the railings are there to hold on, you find it quite challenging to climb.
After Harish repeated dialogue “don’t take break dude” whenever we take breaks, we reached the top of the hills by 11:30am and started descending by 1:10pm reached base by 3:30pm
P.S
And, thanks to Elections, morning while we are on the way to Shivaganga we saw people had been sitting on the top of the buses. We were not exicted to travel the same way.
But While coming, the buses were rush and we just checked out our luck, whether we can board on the top of the bus.
YAHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
The guy agreed, and we sat on the top of the bus and traveled.  I must say, it was an mixed experience of horse ride, when it was going on humps and scary when crossing the electric wire.

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"Between Shades Of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys Book Review

"Between Shades Of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys

Between Shades of Gray begins when the young Lina’s family together with other Lithuanian families was taken away by the NKVD officials on the order of Joseph Stalin who had recently annexed these tiny nations with Soviet Union. The suspected families of anti-soviet activists, higher ranked officers, professionals and even librarians had been arrested by the NKVDs. These people had been separated by men as a group and women, children and physically unfit people as other group. Then they were loaded in the cattle car and transported to Russia to be sold as slaves or forced to work on the beet and potato fields confiscated from the peasants. Separated from her father, Lina together with her mother and younger brother was sent to the fields and forced to work with other people who were already brought up from the same circumstances. There people were starved and struggled a lot for their daily bread. After few years of struggling in the fields, Lina’s family had been moved to a gruesome frozen work camp to build barracks. The only relief to Lina was her art, she drew the places they were moved, happiness and struggles among the people and the pictures she had seen every day and hoped one day that would be the key to the world to know those hidden history. 

Reading historical novels had always been enjoyable to me until I completed reading the last page of the novel Between Shades of Gray. It was a heart wrenching hidden story of the helpless people of tiny nations Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia who had been forced to give up their nation and had been held against their will. This is a wonderful book which holds the history which had been hidden for several decades from rest of the world. This novel documents the devastating moments of the Lithuanian’s lives and a cruellest face of Soviet regime lead by Joeph Stalin. Narrated by a young Lithuanian girl named Lina who posses an excellent art skills and dreams on her exciting future, the story travels along with the happiest moments of the Lithuanians and their unknown destiny once after they had been trapped to Siberia as slaves and workers to the beet forms. The pitch of the story telling was superb and really makes the reader to involve themselves in to the story. It was impossible to me to get out of the book until I finished reading the last page. It is the perfect outburst of the Lithuanian descendent author, which brings out the hideous things still live in the deepest portion of the Lithuanian’s withered hearts. Meanwhile it is very sad to know this hidden history of the most unfortunate people from these small nations. This book is highly recommended for the ones who love to read the history and historical novels. If one want to know how the human life was worth in the near past history, I suggest to read this book. The human life, relationships, emotions, feelings, rights and destiny everything was considered to be worthless than a hundred gram bread and some times a single cigarette in a frozen fields. No matter where you were in the society or how good were you in financial aspects, everything could be turned upside down in a minute and you would be starving in the streets without money if evil had decided to enter into your life. But how would you know if evil chose you and certainly how would you react when it started to ruin your life.. Do read this wonderful book and refresh your historical knowledge. Final if you liked to read The diary of an young girl by Anne Frank and liked the movie Schindler's list, definitely this book is for you and you would be trapped into the novel.

This is a guest post from ThangaPrakash 

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