A Trip to my native..

Last weekend, I took a much needed break from the regular work/sleep routine by making a visit to our home town – Mayiladuthurai. It was  a last minute decision to attend the Kumbabishegam (well, what would you call that in English.. hmm.. may be Temple Warming/renovation ceremony) of the temple that is considered to be the place of worship of our Grandfather (and his forefathers). The temple named Panangudi Mariamman Koil is located in Nalladai Village which is about 20 Kilometers from Mayiladuthurai town. My Grandfather hails from a remote village named Koththangudi which is about a Kilometer from the temple.

The best thing about the tour was that the entire generation (even the future one – my 6 month old) of the family got together and had good time apart from taking the blessings of the God.  Once the Kumbabishegam was done, we went to Kothangudi (first time in my life) wanting to catch a sight of the Agraharam and the temples in and around it. Unbelievable to imagine that my forefathers lived there. Infact, a lot of people have migrated to the towns and metros (including ours ).

This site is supposed to be the place where my forefathers lived (there was a house then). Nothing left now, not even the ownership of the land. Infact, out of the 6 odd houses in the Agraharam, just one or two are occupied by Brahmins. The place though is well surrounded by Farm lands and Ponds with more dogs than Human beings (based on what I saw on that day).

And here is our Family in front of the Shiva temple in Kothangudi. We rejoiced worshiping the God by performing the Poojas, Harathi, Naivedhyam etc. ourselves. This was the highlighted of our tour for me. A very brief but satisfying tour overall..

Way to go Hotmail !

I had my first email ID created by one of my friends in Hotmail back during 98-99 time frame. Though it was the first, preferences changed over the next few months. Usa.net, Lycos and Yahoo came into picture and I found my love for all of them.

Emergence of GMail had the other services wanting not just in terms of space but the usability and speed too. After switching to GMail, every other mail service was pushed behind in terms of usage, hotmail probably taking the last seat. I used to wonder even an year back as to how Hotmail is even surviving, given its sluggish and unresponsive user interface in this GMail era. The only reason I check Hotmail today is because I had subscribed to my school egroups using this ID then and I couldn’t get it changed by the moderator (Manda Mahesh are you listening).. ?

That said, it has actually been good to access Hotmail since the last couple of Months. The UI seemed to be highly responsive and the storage space too has increased. I have not used the Calendar and other stuff but the email interface has definitely gotten better. Come to think of it, it has taken an unrealistic time for Microsoft to react to the GMail onslaught. Anyways, better late than Never.

So, way to go Hotmail …