Mysore-Ooty-Kodai-Kanyakumari

This was something i would have never dared to plan, but my niece's and nephews enthu made this possible. A trip of 6 days planned in 4 hours, booked hotels on phone and set out for the trip.....we wanted to go somewhere on friday morning and ended up on a 6 day trip starting saturday morning!!!

Day 1
The first stop was Mysore - went to Chamundi temple and checked out the Mysore palace, the good thing was we packed the food from home, so it meant less wastage of time for food, we were done with the palace at 2:30PM and had food in the car itself.

We managed to reach Masina gudi a small village about 30 kms before Ooty in a resort owned by Mithun - called Monarch Safari. The place was ok with good food, but the ambiance of the rooms and the maintenance was not really of great standard. We really did not plan ahead of time and that meant you had to compromise and this for me was a compromise. To be fair to the place, the resorts surrounding is good, just that the rooms are bad. One more mistake was this is about 30 kms before Ooty and you have to pass thru the ghat road to reach Ooty and the ghat road is not very friendly.

Day2:
The Monarch served very good breakfast and we set out for Ooty, started off with the Botanical gardens then went to Doddabetta peak - had lunch at Amaravathi restaurant - leaving aside the confusion on whats a buffet (i always knew about veg or non-veg, but here there is Veg meals, Veg Buffet, Non Veg meals, Biryani Buffet etc) the food was great. Once done with the food we started off for the boating, looking at the rush and the number of people there i could convince my family that lets do it the next day and went to Pykara - nice place climbed the peak and back had some fun with the winds too :) All of us were tired by end of the day so decided to head back to the hotel.
This was one of the major inconveniences of taking hotel away from Ooty and that too in Masina gudi, the check post police initially did not allow us to take the ghat road as they felt it was dangerous, then it required some convincing and they told us to go just on the second gear - by the way we were in an Innova.

Day 3
We thought lets do the boating in Kodai and not spend more time in Ooty, so we went out on our journey towards Kodai - the route was Coimbatore - Pollachi - Palani - Kodai about 270 kms in all but the traffic and the ghat road made sure it takes us about 7 hours to reach Kodai. Once in Kodai searching for our hotel was a major pain and when we found it (btw this is called J's residency) we felt Monarch hotel at Masina gudi was heaven. We were given very spacious duplex places in resort but the rooms were horrible and just not maintained - this is one place i dont want to go ever...

Day4
Started off early morning and looked around Kodaikanal, the weather was great and we spent some quality time in boating ( The boating starts at 9AM and we were the first to get into one) - kids enjoyed the horse ride and we hired a guide called Prem who is a 9th class kid who earns money to study by being a guide. The kid was amazing and was way matured for his age. It was 2PM and we thought we should start on our journey to Kanyakumari so that we can atleast reach by 10PM. The route we took was Madurai - Tirunelveli - Kanyakumari : the distance is about 400 kms and our journey was at good pace once we hit the NH7 - the four lane road is still under construction but the road on one side or the other is kinda done so that made our journey smoother, we reached Kodai by 9:30PM - this was a very tiring journey and i really felt we should have turned back from Kodai. Stayed at Singaar International - for a change the hotel was very good and their service was pretty good.

Day5
Sunrise - it was fabulous, in the afternoon we went to the Vivekananda rock and it was a great feeling, did not really spend any time with Thiruvallur as it was already very tiring. We came back to the hotel and spent the remaining day at the room playing dumb charades. Missed out on the sunset as it was cloudy in the second part of the day. Now the challenge was getting back to Bangalore, there were plans of going to Madurai and spend some time there, but some of us were so tired we wanted to head home.

Day 6
This was an amazing day, we traveled 700kms at a stretch, started at 4:30AM in the morning and reached Hosur by 5PM, got caught in the regular electronic city traffic and reached home by 7PM. Huh.....one tiresome journey but the great thing was there were 6 adults and 4 kids in a Innova and the greatest challenge was managing the kids and making sure nothing untoward happened and we all were happy we had a good trip. Clicked about 400 photos, will upload them once i have little more time...

Inspirations leaders & cricket management

Leaders and leaders whatever be the field and they can inspire an ordinary person to become a great one!

I have always felt cricket has lot of management aspects to the game, not sure if this is just my perspective but there are quite a few things that i can attribute to the way cricket is played vs lot of things that are needed in management.

So here i go...

When the IPL started off everyone thought Deccan Chargers was a great team and Rajasthan Royals did not have a chance, with 70% of the matches done with Rajasthan Royals are right on the top and Deccan at the bottom.

My management lesson from this is any number of Great individual contributors are not good enough to make a team and that kind of team cannot execute and win (Deccan Chargers). Whereas a very ordinary team if gels well and has an inspirational leader who can get the best out of an individual would make a great team (Rajasthan Royals).

Shane Warne is the major reason for the success of Rajasthan Royals. Gilly is equally great leader but may not be the same in Shane's league. Also, to be fair to Gilly if he was told he will be the captain and gave some time with the team he can definitely be the one who can change his team's fortunes.

Chennai Superkings are also a good example of a great leadership - my favorite - Mahendar Singh Dhoni. I think for any team to win a major tournament you need a great leader and once you have him he can turn around an ordinary looking team to a great one.