Udaipur - "Grand" is the word

I visited Udaipur for a couple of days. Well whatever travel blogs say about Rajasthan in general and Udaipur in specific is very true. Udaipur (formerly kingdom of Mewar) is rightly Venice of the East with its lakes, and like other destinations in Rajasthan it is very colourful.

Of course, if you actually want to experience the royal lifestyle of Mewar kings, like stay in Lake Palace or dine in the great Durbar hall with the "grandest" chandeliers you can ever hope to see, you should have a lot of money.

A hand-held panorama of Udaipur from City Palace.

Without sounding too critical, it is worth noting that you won't love the lakes if they're dry. So if the rains have been good, the lakes are nice and the fountains have water. If the rains have been scanty, the lakes dry up and don't look so good.

View of the ghats behind Jagdish temple from Lake Pichola

Udaipur is a small city, it won't take too long to go from one end to another. Due to time constraints I couldn't visit too many places. Plus I was careless enough to run out of battery on day two! Check out the Picasa slideshow below for the entire album:

Technical breakthrough in automobile engineering

Engineers have made a major breakthrough by developing the cleanest possible fuel that can run even the most ordinary cars (with no extra modifications). Pay great attention, all you young minds infatuated with the idea of reducing the carbon footprint; the fuel is none other than sound!

Of course it is not any ordinary sound. As per reliable sources (yeah the same engineers) it has to have a particular range in decibels (the scientific unit of measure of sound); the range is identifiable to the common people as the sound of honking.

So when a red light turns green, vehicles right in front of the intersection get a "push" on account of the honking of the next two rows of vehicles, and so on. Of course engineers claim it works even if the traffic light is still red, because in Hyderabad, as soon as the light turns red, the next seventeen vehicles are allowed to cross without stopping (the basis of the choice of seventeen is not clear at the time of publishing, but readers are free to speculate in the comments).

Apparently a lot of seasoned drivers are already aware of this technology, as a result of which within a fraction of a second of a signal turning green, these drivers morons start honking with a fierce intensity and a solid determination to make the supposedly blind drivers in front of them move ahead.

The usage of the term "morons" in the preceding lines is to drive home a startling revelation that may change the lives of almost all drivers in Hyderabad - there is no such technology (or any research in that direction). On a related note, the technology that makes vehicles disappear (more like vaporize) on a jammed lane by honking aloud is going to elude us for a long time to come as well (confirmed by the same sources).

To be fair, the phenomenon of honking to clear the traffic is not confined to Hyderabad. It is present in Noida as well (not much in Delhi perhaps, on account of the ban on blowing the horn within 100 meters of an intersection and the constant fear of enraging a fellow driver whose profession compels him to carry a weapon to work). To sum it up not-so-subtly,

• Horns do not make vehicles move; and
• Horns do not make vehicles disappear on a congested road.

Happy unnecessary-honking-free driving!