Own your ride

Another adventure on the Saturdays. Off late, Saturdays are becoming one of the most happening weekend days for me. This saturday I decided to get the hypothecation off from my RC book. Yippee!! I finished paying up the loan and my babe is all mine now. So to reiterate and confirm the ownership, I decided to get the hypothecation removed. To begin with, I was all apprehensive about the process of how to get it done. I read up few forums and blogs which did help me get a fair idea. But then you never know how the system gives you surprises.

I managed to get my butt off early on Saturday morning while the climate was inviting enough to keep you in bed for hours longer, thanks to the drizzle. After doing the bare minimal morning activities, which excludes bathing and having breakfast :-D, I rushed myself to the Indira Nagar RTO.I was all happy to see the place all deserted. It was around 9. After doing some search for which counter to be going to for my purpose, I finally landed into a queue. Man, tat was quick, from a deserted place to a queue. Time 9:30. I was amused to learn that these babu's work from 10-12 on Saturdays. :-S. Man, that's some hours of work they getting paid for. After patiently waiting for the doors to open by 10, I entered the counter. I was all happy since I was the first person in the queue. I asked the person sitting at one counter about whom to contact regarding my purpose, he pointed me to the desk right beside him.On seeing it unoccupied, I unassumingly asked him if the person would be coming in today. At this, the guy just got pissed and asked me to repeat the question .Seeing red, I smiled and asked the questoin again.Aat this he said, he ll be coming. He also added tat I should not be asking such questions. Man some attitude he had. Anyways, I had all the time in the world , but I was more worried about the babu's, since they had only 2 hours to work. Seeing the desk still unoccupied after half an hour, and the queue just becoming serpentine, this guy finally pointed at a occupied desk where I could head for getting my work done. It seems the guy besides this person was actually not coming in. I thought to myself, I asked him the right question and I got a verbal shot back. Not heeding too much thought into it, I headed towards the counter although I was no longer the first person in the queue. After waiting patient for my turn, I realized I had not paid the fee at the cash counter which was open all the while.

At this, I hurried to the cash counter, paid the fee, got it verified from another counter before heading back to counter where I had to submit my documents. Wow, so much of running around for the sake of process. In the end , I got an acknowledgment from them and walked out pretty happy spending about 2 hours of a Saturday, considering the fact, I didn't have to give a single extra penny which all these govt office's are notorious for. It isn't tat bad after all, I think all you need is a bit of time and patience.

Few pointer:

1. Get all the necessary docs for the process listed below.

a) NOC letter from your bank requesting the RTO to remove the hypothecation from the RC book. Make sure you don't expire the period mentioned in this letter.Otherwise, you'll 've to shell some money to get another one from the bank.
b) Copy of your Insurance certificate.
c) Copy of you PUC certificate.
d) Original RC book

2. First things, first. Pay up your challan fee first at the cash counter to avoid running around as I did. I paid Rs. 100/- at indiranagar RTO.

3. Handy to carry a stapler to staple up your stuff. Though these babu's were kind enough to give their board pins for the purpose.

4. Try not to ask irrelevant question from the officials there, chances are it might leave a sour taste in your mouth, even though you meant no harm with those queries.:-P

5. Try to reach as early as possible to avoid the rush that is likely to be on a day like Saturdays.Though you wont 've to sweat as much as the people who are coming in for DL/LL test.

I have seen many forums quoting higher fee's for this process. I ll confirm this fee once I collect the RC book the coming weekend. Hope this info saves some poor souls of all the confusions like I found myself in. Happy owning your rides. :). Cheers.


Update[27/July/2009]: Yippie!! Got my RC book with the cancellation, and the fee is indeed Rs.100 , I confirm. :-)

Compilation of Errors Succeeded

This was just another cloudy Saturday morning. My friend Sami had asked me to join in for a gallivanting session. Agenda was simple, from her place to a boutique,then buy some Saree's for her mom while I help her choose some shirt material for her dad. Then disperse. And so it happened as planned. It wasn't even half a day, and all this was done. Thinking about the boring other half of the day, I just rode back my home where I saw my room mates rush out to have lunch and come back before they vanished again, leaving my thoughts as blank as they've not been in recent past.What with rides and visits home, it was quite packed weekends I had for quite a while. Meanwhile I got messages from Sami, blaming me for not picking both the shirt pieces. Apparently the one I chose was liked by her dad.


Hours past, till about 7, when I get a frantic call from Sami asking me if I could book train tickets for her parents to Kerala for the evening train. On hearing her tone, I was kinda worried. I immediately stopped all the activities I was trying to accomplish over the internet and got stuck on irctc. My mind was in a state of emergency and could only think of getting tickets for the next day. Logged on to the ever (un)reliable irctc site. Saw last 2 tickets for next day at 615hrs. Booked it right away while Sami was still listening to all the blabber I was telling her about the tickets and train details which only included the train number. Happy to have accomplished the task, the next was to get the tickets printed. So I went to the cafe , got the tickets printed and sent the confirmation message to Sami. Till about 9, things seem perfectly alright when I get a call again from Sami. This time enquiring about the time of the train. Amused at her query, I went in to check the time. Wait, didn't I mention 615hrs. Its in the morning and I was thinking its in the evening. Shocked at my carelessness,I started cursing myself. I guess Murphy's law was trying to make its perfect day on me. To make amends to my mistake, I decided to go and check for ticket availability, this time for a train that's in the evening. With my eye's wide open for the departure time, I was glad to find more than sufficient tickets available for the next day. I call up Sami to inform this, got a confirmation from her end to book those tickets if available. I did that promptly and I was happy again. But only momentarily. Sami, requested me to cancel the other two tickets.That's when I realized that its a tatkal. Perfect, I said to myself. Trying not to think of the blunder already made, I decided to go hand over both the tickets to her. All the while, cursing and talking to myself I rode all the way to her place only to realize that I hadn't taken the evening train tickets printout which her parents planned to take finally!!!


It has to be the best comedy of errors that has happened to me in my very long memory. I looked up to Gods, as if to ask, is there something more in store? By this, the time was already around 1100 oops 2300hrs. Knowing we wont find any internet cafe's nearby to take the other ticket printed, I decided to just come back home before being shot by someone.

Of hairpins and curves of the queen

It was a long weekend. Our plans at office got suspended because of a dropout and lack of enthu I would say. So I had nothing on plate fro 3 days other than preparing for my moms inspection visit along with my sis to my refugee camp ;-). The idea of spending 3 days without nothing was kinda really not what I had thought I d end up doing after working my ass off for so many continuous Saturdays :-(.I called up 2 of the fellow bikers Ive been to trips with.To my disappointment I found one was engaged with his friend and the other actually had started on one bike trip some 10 days back. To my astonishment, he was already in Cal with his bike. No,Its not Calicut,but Kolkotta as it now known. 6 days of ride,and he wasn't done till then. He had plans to go to Shillong and then back to Calcutta, not on bike though. After which he had plans to go to our very own Dilli on his bike. He must be in between that trip while I am typing this stuff out. Shocked about my learning's, I was almost committing myself to do nothing all three days. After spending most of the Friday, sleeping and doing nothing, my neighbors came in and told me that they plan to go to Mysore the next day. That did not excite me at all.So to spice up things a bit we discussed many other places around ,but all with least of common interest. While I was interested to go to Yercaud,my roomie wasn't. So this discussion and madness lasted about half an hour and at 10:30 in the night we decided that we all go to Ooty.Man, it was some discussion! :-). Anyways, things did brighten up for me with a thought of this drive. All the other members went to sleep as it would be an early morning for all of us.Without even realizing this, I kept on searching for articles and blogs for directions and travel tips on the net. By the time I was done with all that, it was already 2 in the night :-).

We got up at 0330 and started packing our stuff. We started off from our place at 0445 in the morning. First stop was to get some cash out of ATM. After which we headed our ways out of Bangalore. Got our babes some much needed refueling at Shell petrol pump on Mysore road. After this, we drove our ways out and the next stop was at Mandya.


I deliberated and prolonged the first stop so that we could cover as much distance before the morning madness. It was around 0630 when we hit our first pit stop at Mandya. Refreshed ourselves to a good cup of tea before we hit the road again. As the sun rose and was getting brighter , we reached Mysore at around 0730. This was a comparatively a longer stop as the 2 bikes were out of sync distance wise and required some distance reconciliation :-P. Thanks to our cell phones, we got back on track and started our journey out of Mysore.

After this our next stop was at Gundalpet at around 0900.We had our breakfast here and at around 0930 we started our journey again.I realized it was perfectly timed as the next 12 kms were full of potholes and most stress full in the whole journey. We labored through those 12 kms and reached Bandipur shortly after that. As we entered the national park, I was all excited with the idea of watching few wild animals in their own backyard :-). We drove very slowly averaging around 40-50kmph through the national park and all we could see was a group of langur's. That was kind of disappointing. As the national park territory came to a end, so did the Karnataka border and we were soon entering the Mudumalai tiger reserve area. We were stopped at the check post to ask if we were carrying some liquor in our bags, as if we d have told yes even if we had. :-P. But we were honest in saying no. ;-). A few kilometers ahead we decided to stop over for a cup of tea again. Here we saw two sign boards, one said Ooty 66kms and the other said 36 kms both in different directions. This got us confused. After some local consulting we decided that we take the shorter route. :-). I had read about the shorter route in blogs and stuff. So I knew something existed, but this stop was very crucial to figure out the exact point of deviation. It was around 1100 at that time. After the tea and slight refreshment we decided to go started over again. As we exited out of Mudumalai tiger reserve,we were thrown open to some place where the roads were narrow.You got to be careful while you are riding here as we figured out.The local vehicles hardly give you any space to ride on, and even push you off the road if need be.So to be safe, just avoid any muscle catching stunts on this road, and give way to them. After sometime things did improve and roads got easier to breath on as we raced ourselves ahead. Within no time we were climbing hairpins. Hairpin bend 36/36 it read and we knew already that this will be one hell of a climb. At about the half way stage, we stopped and decided to take few snaps alongside the board that read hair pin bend 18/36 to give our babes a breather. The last 3 km stretch is the steepest and my bike had tough time climbing. The stretch looked pretty flat to the eye, but it was deceivingly steep in its gradient upwards. At around 1200 we had conquered all the bends and entered the queen of hills. We drove through the pine forest into the city of Ooty. To our discomfort we found that it is the peak season and finding a room was a tough task. After some loitering around for an hour or so in which we saw the boat house thrice, we finally got a place to cool our asses off. After this a quick lunch and a relatively short nap, we kick started our roaming around Ooty. First we hit the boat house. One end , and presumably the more popular end was chaotic. Full of people with hardly any space to breathe. We had seen the quieter version on the other end, so we decided head to that place instead and did our boating there. There after we headed towards the botanical garden. One has to say, the traffic that we encountered in the city was as worse that I've ever seen in my life. Long serpentine queue of four wheelers. Unlike Bangalore though , these were really patient bit of people waiting in the queue for things to clear off. Maybe its the holiday mood that lets people take this stress in light vein.

Thank god we had two wheelers which were let to zip by without any fuss.We reached botanical garden and saw sea of people just thronging in. We decided to get ourselves a cuppa masala tea and chilli bhajji :-P b4 we dared to enter the severely crowded garden. Its the flower show time there and it was quite a spectacle to watch the few glimpses that we managed to see. After some relatively quick snaps, we decided to wrap this up and head towards the valley view point on the outskirts of the city. I was really tired and fatigued for lack of sleep by now. So I couldn't enjoy this bit of the trip as much :-(. Day 2 saw us venture out of Ooty into the beautiful city of Coonor.

The drive was breathtaking with lots of seductive curves and lovely weather to give you company.We visited dolphin's nose,lamb rock viewpoints during this stretch after which we decided to wrap our stuffs and head back home for lack of time :-(. We started our journey back at around 1400 from Ooty. On our way back, my roomie wanted to take few snaps in the pine forest and I wanted to take a snap right under the board which read hair pin bend 1/36 \m/.
During our decent we just turned off our engines and rolled down on our bikes. Reminded me of the child hood days when i used to play with vehicle tyres and the way I enjoyed watching it roll it down the slope. :-).We also happened to see a herd of deers while treading our way back through the national park.

Apart from a last mile glitch which saw my gear lever bend and few heated words exchanged, this trip was thoroughly enjoyable. We reached back home by 2300 and were all ready hit the bed ASAP. I realized I still hadn't done my cleaning bit before my mom came for the inspection the next day. So the night stretched on till 0200 for me before I could hit the bed, thanking my stars for giving me more memories to cherish. :-)