December 31, 2023

Sunday, 11:30 PM

Vetri Residency, 

Panchayat Office road, 

Village Malumichampatti,

Taluk Coimbatore-South,

District Coimbatore, 

Tamil Nadu, India

Today, we all got up late and were feeling particularly lazy for the reason for having been very tired yesterday. And we realized that we had to change our current homestay because our homestay owner had booked our current space to someone else. “By mistake,” she said with apology that sounded sincere, and we had no reason to disbelieve her. That left us with this extra work of having to another place to stay. She arranged for a different homestay owned by the same person, but it was at a distance of about 20-25 minutes from Pollachi. 

The other problem we had was that due to the quantity of data we were quickly running out of space and that has been our regular problem. Apart from the data space issue, we had another one on our hands, which was to get a BSNL SIM card, as the only service provider that has service in the largely unserviceable areas is the state-owned BSNL, for which we are thankful (also, it is one of the main reason why BSNL is still in business despite other big players). But we failed to get a BSNL SIM for two reasons. One, here everybody speaks Tamil and no other language, including English, and we know no other language than Hindi and English. And two, it’s a Sunday today, which left us with fewer options and at the end we had no option except returning without the requisite piece of technology. To make matters worse, we are from Delhi and so they were not giving us the SIM card on our Delhi ID cards.

Having failed to find the BSNL Sim cards, we went to Coimbatore to sort out our data problem and had hard time doing that, too. We got one SDD of 2-TB capacity and two HDDs of 5-TB capacity each, and while it doesn’t exactly solve the problem, it does give the problem a pause for now. And then we got our meal packed and returned to our new homestay.

After eating, we went for a walk and came across a lady making rangoli for new year. They use cow dung and paint to make their new year rangoli, which looks quite beautiful — at least, this one did but definitely one could botch it up, too, for it does take some talent to paint.