10,000 bird species in the world, 1350 are found in India. Bangalore has more than 250!

It is absolutely mind-boggling that these animals, which have descended from the dinosaurs, and are still around us today, going around like there’s no one bothering, never piqued my interest as much as before, as of late.

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Whenever I thought about birds (or wildlife in general), the sheer number of names people mentioned who knew them was intimidating enough to keep me from trying to remember them or learn about them. But the start had to be made.

I chose Pikalara’s Introduction to Birding workshop (Baanaadi — a Kannada word meaning "skydwellers") to take that plunge, and I am super glad I did!

Their approach to telling you about birds felt like a school’s field trip more than anything else. You had to be a sponge to absorb all that knowledge that was floating around, and like a stray log floating away downstream in a river, you’ll find your feet somewhere — well, I did.

Let me tell all about it!

The location

The workshop notification came around a month in advance, and we had enough time to plan our leaves and sort our travel arrangements. Pikalara even offered us car pooling with other participants, so that logistics is one of the lesser things to worry about.

The location this time was Ballur Estate, in Chickamagalur. And oh my, the moment I saw the rooms in the PDF they shared!

The rooms had really high ceilings, and the bathrooms had a skyroof!

All our bird walks happened here, except one.

But I am pacing ahead of myself, things just didnt’ just start right away, the anticipation and knowledge was built like Lego blocks by Pikalara guys — Sandeep & Lohith!

Day #1 — Bangalore to Ballur Estate, Chickamagalur (20th Feb, 2026)

The day before the travel, Lohith had messaged on the a WhatsApp group he created that all folks from Bangalore, we meet at Govardhan theatre at 6 am for an easy start.

But, somewhere it was in my head that it was 6:30 and we missed meeting everyone that morning. Halfway around before reaching the meeting point, I was asked to meet at Dhumbi Farms near Shantigrama, and the location was shared on WhatsApp.

Google Maps showed that it would be 9 am when we reach there, and more or less we were on time, including a couple of breaks for coffee and stretching!

Dhumbi Farms, run by a couple, Akshata & Madhu, ex-city folks who have chosen to live the farm life, and moved to a place near Madhu’s village where they teach farming, sustainability, and other organic practices — check their Instagram!

This was our breakfast spot, and also the place of our first bird walk!

We were famished by the time we reached there, and a hot breakfast was already waiting for us! We had amazing Khara Bath, Kesari Bath & Patrode. This farm itself was surrounded by many birds, and people started noticing them, taking pictures, etc.

This is where we were joined by Mr. Shekar Dattatri, more about him later!

After breakfast, we had a small orientation & introduction between the group members before starting on our first walk. This was a good ice-breaker for us, at least knowing names before starting our sessions. For those who didn’t have binoculars, they were given one each by Pikalara folks.

There’s a lake nearby, Shantigrama Kere, and this has a lot of water birds. As per our eBird list, we saw 39 species here! With Lohith on binoculars and Sandeep manning the scope, we were able to spot so many of them!

Everyone who understood birds before was guessing names, looking up field guides or apps to confirm their findings, but my wife and I were both clueless, but we stayed true to what we were told in the orientation —

“focus on looking at wings, beak, colors, calls — anything that you can notice and don’t bother about names”

Even if it was a bit unsettling, we played along and were exhausted from the knowledge and hot sun within an hour.

We got back to Dhumbi Farm again, and had cold spiced buttermilk before heading to Balur Estate, 3 more hours from there. With the perfect fuel done, and in the promise of a fabulous lunch waiting for us in the estate, we got back on the road.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, except for us watching the coffee plantations around us & negotiating the winds of the Western Ghats!

Around 3 pm, when we reached the estate, people were already having lunch. I quickly filled my plate and emptied it at that speed. I was famished, and the food was lovely!

We were given a time of 16:30 for assembly, where, after coffee, we would head to the second birdwalk.

Back in the room after lunch & unpacking, I couldn’t help but just catch the powerful 40 winks of sleep before being out right on time!

Geared up and fuelled with coffee, we started on our second walk for the day. It was a forest walk within the estate, reaching till a lake & I was not sure what to expect.

I just walked, registered the names in my head, looked up in my binoculars, and went with the flow. The foliage was too dense, and spotting without shooing the bird away was a bit of a challenge. Even still, we spotted 10 species!

A teeny bit exhausted, we band together and start walking back to the housing & get ready for our sessions.

Session #1: Wildlife filmmaker Mr. Shekar Dattatri

Mr. Shekar’s session was not on the agenda we were given, but as he happened to be there serendipitously, he awed everyone with his work, ethics, and words.

His choice of words, clips to show, and driving home the message of conservation in everything he has done till today, stands as a shining example of resilience in people. One of the phrases that he said during his talk, “awareness without action is meaningless”, happened to resonate a lot with me.

He showed us his work about the flamingos in the Thane creek, and told us about his challenges in filming and how the BNHS scientists were collecting data about them. The next one was a film he made about Chilika (Chilika — Jewel of Odisha).

This was the close of our long day, and we had an early dinner and retired to our rooms. The timing for the next day was 06:30 hours.

Day #2 — Ballur Estate, Chickamagalur (21st Feb, 2026)

Surrounded by coffee plants and lots of birds, the morning noise was a welcome change from the city’s garbage collection call. We got into our dull colored dresses, full shoes for the nature walk — attire being important for us to blend in with nature.

The first sight in the morning, before coffee, was of a high soaring black eagle, a bird of prey, and were asked to just look at the way it glides. What a majestic bird!

After the coffee hit, we started walking slowly up the road, looking at trees above and waiting for a chance to catch a glimpse of a bird. We did, and we did so many! The orange minivet, which was elusive for many the day before, was in clear sight by the road, and made loud calls, much to our amazement! (See — I named a bird!)

We walked up a hilly road, which led to the source of river Hemavathi, a tributary to Kaveri. There was a valley on one side, and hilly forests on the other — and many birds! This is actually when we started taking notes of names, looking at pictures in the field guides and comparing to what we saw.

After a fun 3 hours walk, we stopped by the fig tree at the entrance and even though everyone was hungry — we spent 20 minutes looking at the aerial visitors. After breakfast, we had one hour to get back for our first Baanaadi session with the Pikalara Boys!

The first session was led by Sandeep, where he had us draw a bird and identify its parts. Some of us who had drawn less than one-inch images were super amused that the parts labelling was virtually impossible. But we did again, and we learnt!

The second session with Lohith covered more about the avian history, interesting birds, more about birding, binoculars and maintaining checklists — the whole nine yards of birding!

Such an informative session called for an equally sumptuous lunch! And again, the evening walk was scheduled for 16:30.

Just as we assembled and had coffee, black clouds covered the sky & a few peltering rain drops fell on a few of us. We decided to hang around the property since finding shelter in the forest walk would have been impossible — but no regrets, this was no less of a treat!

This walk was followed by the most-awaited session — Bird Identification. For once, this session had multiple interruptions where fresh hot bajjis kept flowing from the kitchen, and all of us had one eye on the presentation & another on the hot bajji. This session by Sandeep had to be strategised well for us to absorb nuggets of knowledge and piping hot bajjis without compromising one for the other!

This was followed by Shekar sir’s movie presentation, his work on the painted storks of Bharatpur — where he showed us a small clip about a particular bird behaviour and emphasised on the importance of patience in having a chance to view this.

The final clip we saw of his work was about the Amur Falcons, in which a journalist took it upon herself to save them and restore their numbers.

His message for us to always have an eye out for such conservation work was driven home well; it is not a superhero’s job to do — it is us!

This was followed by a session from Lohith about endangered birds in India and other parts of conservation where attention is needed today!

Day #3— Ballur Estate, Chickamagalur (22nd Feb, 2026)

The meetup time was 06:30 for coffee & walk, but there was a twist — Sandeep took another session on the tips & tricks of bird identification and mentioned that we will carry our notebooks to the field, make notes, but no bird names will be given out.

The message was simple yet powerful; we had to observe!

We started on the walk, and our first stop was the fig tree right at the gate. Many birds, and sometimes multiple of a kind on different branches. We possibly spent almost an hour before we hit our Hemavathi river trail.

This walk saw people sketching on their notebooks, writing down traits & sometimes, names with confidence. It was silent, after all the learnings about nature we had been imparted over the last few sessions.

We were back to base by 10:00, and had breakfast. We were given an hour to pack, and come back at 11:00 for the closing session and debrief.

In the closing session, Lohith went over a recap of everything we had done over the last 3 days. Sandeep went over bird rescue tips and what numbers to call for Bangalore (just wild birds). And we had the final certificate distributions!

The participants also shared their feedback on how much they learnt and lived a true birding experience, many of the choice words that people used to describe their experience were overwhelming and had a deep connect.

This was the closing of a knowledge-filled weekend, something that nourished my soul and heart with new information about wildlife. I came back knowing a lot more about birds than I had ever researched.

Reach out to Pikalara on Instagram, follow them there to know more about such workshops in the future!

The return journey to Bangalore was interesting in one aspect, I saw my wife looking up at birds and trying to describe their wings, glide, etc., something we had never done before!

Trip Resources

• eBird Trip Report

A weekend workshop on Birding was originally published in My Small Wanders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬…

If you’re like me — someone who enjoys capturing moments and revisiting them later — here’s a tiny Python script that can help you do exactly that. It generates an .ics file (a standard calendar file) that you can import into any calendar app and keep those memories stored forever.

𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐈 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬?
Life moves fast. Big and small events happen every month, and it’s not always possible to document them as they happen. So I started doing a simple exercise: once every quarter, I sit down, note all memorable moments in a spreadsheet, and import them into my calendar.

This script automates the boring part.

If you want to try it, the code is here:

Notes

Prompt used for this image

A serene scene of a person sitting at a desk with a laptop, importing memories into a digital calendar; abstract floating event cards around them; soft lighting; modern vector art style.

From CSV to Calendars was originally published in Noob Techie on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have been a product development person for a very long, and most of it has been with small startups; this means I had to stretch into unknown realms to get things moving fast.

When I started working with RightSense almost 3 years ago, I took up the AWS infrastructure for the multiple applications we were developing and all of it was new for me.

I worked with Terraform & GitLab CI, and ran through multiple iterations to finally set up our IaaC; all of it sounds nice in one line but I still can remember my struggles with the smallest things.

Now, coming to the scary part!

I used Application Load Balancers to distribute incoming traffic to my EC2 instances and one thing missed my eye - a default load balancer rule.

This rule specified that if any traffic hits the load balancer, let it pass to my server!

At first glance, it might not be obvious as that’s what load balancers are meant to do! But the problem arises when there’s some misconfiguration.

Let’s say the IP Address of the load balancer in question is x.x.x.x & someone misconfigures this address as an A record on their domain records — all hell will break loose!

Your site now becomes available on 2 URLs — one which you know via your application, another from the DNS of the other person!

Handling this is simple by stopping all traffic as a default rule and allowing in only when there’s a DNS match.

With the condition in the above screenshot, things worked well and not any random hostname would be allowed.

My Scary Experience With AWS Route53 was originally published in Noob Techie on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A little before 2015, a senior finished his Open Water certification at Pondicherry, and I messaged him asking for details, when he mentioned that swimming 200 meters without aid is a criterion, I was not very confident about my abilities. I could have improved with practice, but again that needed effort which perhaps I couldn’t spare then.

Fast forward to the early part of 2022, during a conversation with a friend, she expressed her desire to finish her Open Water SCUBA certification the same year in September, I was awed by her commitment and dedication. It rekindled in me the desire to get one for myself, and maybe see how far I could push.

As I recount my dive experiences below, I feel these were stepping stones toward the cliff where I took my first leap to dive independently. I’ll save that feeling for a post later.

My first dive — Sri Lanka, 2015

I don’t think I had any goal in mind, or any thought put into the process at all till I jumped into the blue seas in Sri Lanka, in October 2015. My first international trip, and like any other person, I thought I’d do SCUBA because that’s what all the blogs had said.

An early morning train from Colombo took us to a small beach town, Hikkaduwa.

Upon reaching there, the first thing we figured out was a dive shop nearby. Had done very little research about shops because of our limited knowledge yet landed up at a decent one.

I was floored by how they diligently explained the process, from assembling the equipment to controlling breath and mask underwater. I am a sucker for information, and this was a completely new world!

Soon we jumped into the water, and oh boy.. the coast of Sri Lanka was so pristine, so beautiful, and amazing!

This was a shore dive (where you don’t go on a boat, but just walk from the shore), and we couldn’t go very deep. But we all came out happy and smiling, clicking lots of pictures along the way.

There was no “Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara” (ZNMD) moment for me, but I had already resolved to explore more. Maybe dive at every possible place I visit.

My Second Dive — Maldives, 2020

Between 2015 & 2020, the thought of underwater and SCUBA crossed my mind. I had even thought about taking the Open Water Certification, but my swimming skills were not great then and I didn’t put much effort into this.

Fast came my trip to the Maldives, another beautiful resort island, with blue water and rich marine life. This was again another shore dive, where we just kitted up and walked into the waters.. looking at reef sharks, small fishes, live corals, and of course, my favorite turtles!

This dive entirely was another beautiful experience that pushed me to think about my resolve to take up the certification.

But well, everyone knows 2020. That happened and multiple things happened in my personal life, that pursuing a hobby (or passion) was pushed to perhaps the last unreachable corner in my mind.

My Third Dive — Gokarna, 2023 (Netrani Islands)

This was my first boat dive, and when the boat left the shores of Murudeshwar, a little away from Gokarna I was a bit dizzy. Perhaps the seasickness had hit a teeny bit, but I was fine; along with a boat full of people who were to go one after the other into the sea, and all I could do was either sit on the boat or snorkle around.

This dive was with the same friend, who had done her SCUBA certification already; and she was having her gala time of diving around without any assistance.

This dive pushed me a bit into the zone of thinking that I didn’t enjoy being dragged around, and I wanted to explore anything at my own pace. And the only way possible was to get certified.

I only had to work on my swimming skills, and just set a date to take the plunge, literally.

With my senior’s certification acting as a catalyst, and this friend’s encouragement & assurance acting as a promoter to my long asleep reaction; I sat in the driver’s seat much determined to finish it this time.

I did get my certification in September 2023, but that’s another story for another day. I am happy and satisfied that I could achieve my goal with some good people helping and pushing me along the way; their contribution I won’t forget.

My love for the Underwaters was originally published in My Small Wanders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When in school, quite early in our Odia textbooks, we had chapters on places of major importance to the state. Bhitarkanika, Harishankar, Chilika, etc. all of which now in the era of social-media could be widely seen on screen, but then it could only be visualized with those many words and all we could see in our heads!

About Bhitarkanika

Spanning an area of 145 sq. km., this National Park lies in the Kendrapada district of Odisha. Bhitarkanika was designated a national park in 1998, and a Ramsar site, the second in the state after Chilika, in 2002.

A Ramsar site is a wetland site designated to be of ecological importance internationally, and hence the need to be conserved as per the Ramsar Convention of 1971.

Bhitarkanika, the name comes from two Odia words “Bhitar” meaning inner, and “Kanika” meaning beauty. This area of Kendrapada was ruled over by the Kanika kings for many years, yet the palace at Rajakanika was built by Rajendra Narayan Bhanjadeo over a century ago in 1910s/1920s, has a museum which holds the largest crocodile skull as per the Guiness Book of World Records. The kings and their ancestors used the current park area, as their hunting grounds where they hunt big cats, crocodiles and sometimes deers.

Bhitarkanika is home to salt water crocodiles, which are unique to India and the largest crocodiles in the world. These crocodiles, also called esutarine crocodiles, and are very aggressive as they feed on both land and ocean animals.

The area that’s declared a sanctuary becomes a no-man zone during the crocodile mating and hatching season (summer and monsoon months). The forest officials who man this area during the period, in an effort to conserve this crocodiles, collect some of their eggs and hatch them artificially, these hatchlings are released when they are 1 metres in length. This ensure better survival rates, since the survival chance is only 4% in the wild.

Getting There & Our Itinierary

Since the area open up for visitors after August, people look for a pleasant time, which for most of Odisha is after October. You can of course plan everything individually yourself, or just pick a travel operator to organize everything for you.

We chose to go with Sand & Pebbles, a tour operator based out of Bhubaneswar who operate a resort there and organise everything end to end.

We had opted for a 2N3D which would have three boat-rides, all meals and accommodations included. We just drove down from Bhubaneswar and everything else was sorted!

Day 1: Arrival & Sunset Boating

We started from Bhubaneswar at around 9 am, followed our map (avoiding the ferry route) and reached the resort at around 1 pm. After check-in we were told that lunch is ready, and we had to be ready for our first Sunset Boating at 3 pm.

The lunch was amazing, a 3 course meal, with Fish & Prawns which were so fresh, good and super well made that we needed a nap for almost an hour. Still a little tired and sleepy, we stuck to our 3 pm time and were out of the cottage when we saw our guide beckoning us to start towards the boating point.

We soon boarded our first boat, Maa Nachinda, which took us riding into the sunset.

The boats travel at speeds up to only 10 km/hr, and it started to make way towards the confluence of Brahmani & Baitarani, two major rivers of Odisha to catch one of the best sunset I have ever seen!

After this magnificent view, the evening winds started to grow cold and the only way to seek relief was to warm ourselves up by the small fireplace we had in front of our tent.

After a quick and sumptuous dinner, we took a small stroll around the property and retired to start an early day. The early morning boating time is always 7 am, while breakfast is served right at 6:30 am.

Day 2: Visit to Kalibhanja Diha

Day 2 started early, and we were greeted with an magnificent sunrise. After a quick breakfast, we set out to the Khola Jetty where we parked our car and hopped onto another boat.

Kalibhanja Diha is a distinct island of Bhitarkanika, where the eggs of crocodiles were first found, led to this being established as a sanctuary. This “Diha” or island is home to many crocodiles, small and big cats, deer, and many birds. It is entirely uninhabited and only a small section is open to visiting tourists, always accompanied by a guide. This gets completely submerged during the summer and monsoons, which is the mating and hatching season for crocodiles.

The bow of all boats are dedicated as an idol of Maa Mangala, who blesses her divinity on the voyage the boat undertakes.

It takes around 2 hours to reach the Kalibhanja Diha jetty, this island is closer to the Dhamara port which is an important fishing harbor of the region. Since early mornings are high tide, and the sun isn’t hot enough for the crocodiles to come up to the shore, we didn’t see any. Just a few birds going about their lives.

This 2 hours of ride was filled with picturesque scenery of mangroves, mini islands in themselves, which we knew were home to many animals and a lot of flora-fauna, yet we could just get the glimpse of a fishing cat.

Upon arriving at the jetty, we started out on foot to explore the island. Only a small part of it is open for visit to tourists, and we ensured we made good use of the same.

The state forest department have taken up aggressive afforestation of these islands to ensure the safety and continuity of this ecosystem. They have been mindful enough to leave out open spaces on the islands, like ones below; for deers to spend the night. Deers always spend nights at open areas away from vegetation and go back into forest right before dawn.

Our guide, Mr. Dharma Rao, loaded us with trivias and was super eager to handle any questions that we might have. He even opened Google Maps on his phone to show us the open area on the island, where deers would rest at night.

This island turns into a swamp during the monsoons, where crocodiles come and lay their eggs and wait for it to hatch. Such islands are many around this area, however this is an important island of this entire park.

With the sun a little over our head, we started our walk back to the jetty to get started on our return journey. This was the time of seeing crocodiles! Armed with my 70–300mm, braving the hot sun I sat on top of the boat scouting for crocs!

It was very quick that we had our first spotting but to our despair it slid into the water upon hearing the boat approaching. This just didn’t happen once but multiple times, our boatman Ambika explained that these beings on this side of Bhitarkanika. Mr. Rao, our guide, consoled us that the next day would be a gala time.

We still spotted a few from afar, also because the banks were too far, but still nothing where we could see the details of this beast. I spent my time chatting up with a young doctor about a variety of random stuff.

Upon reaching our resort, we had our lunch and enjoyed a siesta till 4:30 pm and then headed for a beautiful temple close to our place of stay.

Righgarh Baladev Jew Temple

The Righagarh Baladev Jew Temple is a 350–400 year old temple built by Balabhadra Bhanja Deo, the then king of Kanika and is still maintained and owned by the royal family. This temple is actually situated very deep in the Bhitarkanika sanctuary, and was not really accesssible previously. The rituals at this temple is similar to that of Puri.

One can see the intricate architecture of the temple and its furnishings, the granary right beside it and a snana mandapa within the temple premises.

We waited till it was dark, and participated in the temple’s evening aarti. It was an elaborate ritual starting with the elder brother, then Sri Jagannath and finally their sister, Devi Subhadra.

After reaching back to our resort, we sat around the campfire and rested well for our final day of our trip.

Day 3: Visit to Bhitarkanika National Park (Dangamala)

Like the previous day, this day started early as well. I completed the checkout formalities, loaded the luggage in our car, finished breakfast and reached the jetty right at 7!

We boarded Ganga Sagar, captained by Kartik and Dilip, accompanied again by our guide Mr. Dharma Rao and as the boat started sailing, we didn’t expect to see crocodiles, we had learnt they only come up to bathe in the sun, so we relaxed and focused our attention on other important parts ot the mangrove ecosystems — trees, birds, small animals, etc.

As the boat started moving deep into the sanctuary, we trained our eyes to the shore and ears to our guide. He described this land as “India’s Mini Amazon”, which has winding rivers surrounded by dense mangrove greenery on either side, and loaded us with multiple trivias around the trees and other components of this eco-system.

We spotted birds — parrots, black-neck crane, kingfisher.. monkeys, a small doe from very close quarter.

Even though I hadn’t expected to see any crocodiles on the onward journey, our keen eyed boatman, Dilip, spotted and directed us to our first crocodile of the day!

Bhitarkanika holds the record for the largest crocodiles that the world has ever seen! The current record of the longest crocodile is held by Kalia, a 24 feet long crocodile, who is identified with his missing foot. Kalia’s territory is very near to the Khola jetty which was our starting point towards Dangamala.

Crocodiles are territorial animals and they fiercely defend their territory. This sanctuary also has the only three albino estuarine crocodile in the world — Gori, Malli, and youngest Sweta, who hatched in the hatchery and now are being bred in captivity. Forest officials had twice tried to mate Gori with another crocodile unsuccessfully, and after that she has been kept separate after losing an eye.

After this short voyage of 45 minutes, we reached the museum are which was the official area of the sanctuary containing information about crocodiles and other flora-fauna.

Our first stop was the nursery which has 67 varieties of trees found in the Bhitarkanika National Park. The goal behind setting up this nursery was to conserve the trees which help in the eco-system and prevent them from extinction.

After the hatchery, it was time to visit the museum which houses a couple of crocodile skeleton, one of which is almost 20 feet long!

Apart from these two majestic skeletons, there are multiple preserved specimens of eggs, hatchlings, skulls of all animals from the Bhitarkanika region. The museum person who goes around with every group explains all these with the eager of a school teacher and in a crisp manner!

Right across from the museum is the hatchery which has 10 glass cells. Each cell contains one stage of the crocodile’s lifecycle, starting from an egg in cell 1.

Just beside the museum there’s a wild crocodile who comes by, perhaps whenever he pleases to sunbathe. Caught up with an open mouth.

A crocodile opens their mouth to help regulate their body temperature since they cannot sweat and this often happens since their body temperature increases when they are basking in the sun, also they sleep with their mouth open.

The national park also commemorate the green soldiers who lost their lives in crocodile attacks whilst on their duty.

We also had on our itinerary a small trek to the hunting lodge of the king, which the guide gave a miss, citing less interests from other folks in the group. He offered to compensate by increasing the boat ride time by another half hour, so we went further onto Gupti side to spot more crocodiles.

This extended boat ride helped us quite a bit in the spotting! A kingfisher in flight, and three huge crocodiles apart from multiple small ones.

We were told by the museum guy that the length of a crocodile in the wild is calculated by two ways — length of head times 7 or length of snout to mid-back times two.

The possible length of crocodile #3’s head is 2.5 to 3 feet, and it was very near to Kalia’s enclosure, even though we couldn’t confirm the missing foot, I would really want to believe we saw him!

Soon as we landed back at the jetty, we had our hearts full, beaming a smile bid our farewell to our newly made friends and set off on the return journey back. A beautiful trip of 3 days and memories that will last a lifetime.

India’s Mini Amazon — Bhitarkanika was originally published in My Small Wanders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What made me do this?

I recently attended a SWAN Sadhana (Strength, Weakness, Ambitions, Needs Meditation) that involved using Yoga Nidra to reflect on this past year and how it has shaped my being. I resolved to write more following that, and here it is!

This post would be a reminder to myself of how seeing places, meeting people, trying experiences, and even just the outdoors makes me happy!

January 2023

I greeted the new year with sunrise at Odisha’s second Blue Flag Beach, Sonepur Beach with family, even though the foggy weather didn’t allow us to see the sunrise, we had an amazing time sitting by the beach and waiting for the sun.

I also took my first First Class train journey, ever! This was from Berhampur to Bangalore, a journey of 28 hours. Not so great for me, but I would definitely want to try the Rajdhani Expresse’s First Class someday.

February 2023

Towards the end of February, went on a short weekend trip to Gokarna. The intention was to dive, and oh boy I did!

This short diving trip ignited the fire in me that I had once stoked many years back, to get certified in diving! I came back from the trip, enrolled myself into swimming classes, and fell in love with swimming again!

March 2023

The beautiful month of March saw a road trip to Mysore with my family, and the happiness I had in showing everyone around the beautiful city! I cannot forget the safari, where I saw one of my most favorite creatures on earth! The naturalist accompanying us loaded with many many jungle trivias, cannot forget him.

April 2023

Visited home and got around Odisha quite a bit.

Did yet another road trip! Did a 1250 km road trip, with one stop over at Ongole in Andhra Pradesh, to get my folks to Bangalore!

May 2023

Spent the entire month of preparing for a trip to the chotta chardham, and thoroughly enjoyed that trip!

June 2023

My legs and spirit wasn’t tired after the visit to Uttarakhan, snuck in a few days to visit Pondicherry and the Aurobindo Ashram. I was lucky to visit the inside chambers of the Matru Mandir of Auroville for the first time.

July 2023

Did the 1250 km road trip back to Odisha, and visited Papa’s farm!

August 2023

Dutifully spent entire August in Bangalore, meeting friends and family, also preparing for the swimming test I was to appear for my SCUBA diving certification.

September 2023

Has been my biggest highlight! I jumped into the open waters, learnt diving, frutified a dream I have had had since the last 8 years! Finished Open Water, Advanced Open Water & Nitrox Speciality. The entire experience in detail, would actually be better said in a different post.

Also, went on a small family picnic to Arakavathi River.

October 2023

Another favorite month! Went on an amazing trek to Gomukh Tapovan. The Himlayas are always mesmerising and I cannot ever have enough of those views!

Roamed around Delhi, gorged on great food and immersed myself into historical monuments.

November 2023

Went on a road trip to Gokarna and Udupi, and enjoyed beaches at both the locations. The Arabian Sea in Karnataka is somehow super pretty!

December 2023

A relaxed trip to Goa, gorged on more food and chasing sunsets. Danced away at random places where the music seemed great! Had taken my DSLR on this trip and enjoyed the camera clicking process, have decided to improve my portrait photography skills.

Another trek with friends to Kaiwar Betta, a short trek out of Bangalore for the amazing views and spending a Sunday in the best possible way.

As I write this, with two more weeks to go, I have a few more trips planned. Although they won’t make it to this wrap, but it’ll definitely be etched in my memories.

Hope for more travels and happiness in the years to come!

My Travel Wrapped — 2023 was originally published in My Small Wanders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• What AWS Region does the bucket lies in?
• Should you enable versioning?

I ran into this problem quite recently when I was testing SES Email Receiving in S3.

First, us-west-1 (North California), where our interest lies, doesn't support email receiving (as of Dec 2022), and we started our test with us-west-2 (Oregon).

When trying to deploy the setup to production is when we realized that we cannot use SES to write to a bucket that is in a different region than itself. So shoot! We scrambled for a solution.

We decided to keep running our SES infra on us-west-2 (Oregon) and use the S3 Batch Operation to copy the data from our Oregon bucket to our North California bucket.

How? That’s why this write-up.!

Before we start out, here’s what we need to do:

• Create two buckets, and name them, dev-src and dev-dest (referring to source and destination in our case). These buckets, for our purpose of understanding, let us create in two different regions.
• Enable versioning on both of them.

Creating a Policy — Allowing S3 Access

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:ListAllMyBuckets"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::*"
        },
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor1",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:ListBucket"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::dev-src",
                "arn:aws:s3:::dev-dest"
            ]
        },
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor2",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:DeleteObject"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::dev-src/*",
                "arn:aws:s3:::dev-dest/*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Creating a Policy — Allowing S3 Replication Access

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutReplicationConfiguration",
                "s3:GetObjectVersionForReplication",
                "s3:InitiateReplication",
                "s3:GetReplicationConfiguration",
                "s3:PutInventoryConfiguration",
                "s3:GetObjectVersionForReplication",
                "s3:GetObjectVersionAcl",
                "s3:GetObjectVersionTagging",
                "s3:ReplicateObject",
                "s3:ReplicateDelete",
                "s3:ReplicateTags"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::dev-src",
                "arn:aws:s3:::dev-dest"
            ]
        },
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor1",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutReplicationConfiguration",
                "s3:GetObjectVersionForReplication",
                "s3:InitiateReplication",
                "s3:GetReplicationConfiguration",
                "s3:PutInventoryConfiguration",
                "s3:GetObjectVersionForReplication",
                "s3:GetObjectVersionAcl",
                "s3:GetObjectVersionTagging",
                "s3:ReplicateObject",
                "s3:ReplicateDelete",
                "s3:ReplicateTags"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::dev-src/*",
                "arn:aws:s3:::dev-dest/*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Create a Role

Include both the policies we created above in that role.

S3 Buckets

On AWS Console, open the dev-src bucket’s Management section. You’ll find a section for Replication Rules

When you click on “Create replication rule”

• In the first section, enter the rule name and keep it as Enabled for now.

• Configure the source detail like prefix, tag, etc. which would be used in the filter criteria.

• Configure Destination — select the bucket created (dev-dest)

• Enter IAM Details, get the ARN of the role we created above, or just find the role by its name.

• Click Save and you’ll be asked to choose if you want to replicate existing objects (if any) or not. Choose accordingly and Save!

If you choose to replicate, you’ll be asked to create an S3 Batch Operation Job right after this.

• Select the setting that suits you best, I’ll leave it at the default.

• Once the job completes, set the path to find a completion report for (ensure that your role has access to that path too).

• Choose the Role which we created above.

• Click Save

Now, from the same tab of S3, you’ll see an option Batch Operations. Click that and you’ll see this job listed there.

Once it is ready, Click Run.

If there’s some error, the errors will be logged into the completion report location you mentioned while creating the job.

Syncing two buckets in AWS S3 was originally published in Noob Techie on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pre-Requisites

• if you are to use via CLI, you need to have aws-cli installed.
• if you want to have boto3, use pip to install the same
• The MFA ARN — can be found under the “Security Credentials” option from the drop-down on the right top of the AWS Console page.

Accessing via CLI

Replace the AWS_MFA_CONFIG with the ARN of the MFA device you got from the console above.

Save the below snippet in a shell script named, fetch_mfa.sh

Give execute permission to the script using the chmod command

AWS_SRC_PROFILE=default
AWS_DEST_PROFILE=mfa
AWS_MFA_CONFIG=<MFA>
AWS_MFA_TOKEN=$1

aws --profile ${AWS_SRC_PROFILE} sts get-session-token --duration 129600 --serial-number ${AWS_MFA_CONFIG} --token-code ${AWS_MFA_TOKEN} | jq -r '@sh "export TMP_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\(.Credentials.AccessKeyId)\nexport TMP_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_SECRET=\(.Credentials.SecretAccessKey)\nexport TMP_AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\(.Credentials.SessionToken)"' > .aws_mfa.creds

source .aws_mfa.creds
aws configure set aws_access_key_id ${TMP_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID} --profile mfa
aws configure set aws_secret_access_key ${TMP_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_SECRET} --profile mfa
aws configure set aws_session_token ${TMP_AWS_SESSION_TOKEN} --profile mfa

rm -rf .aws_mfa.creds
aws s3 ls --profile mfa

How to run the script?

./fetch_mfa.sh <token-from-device>

Accessing via boto3

Save the following snippet in a file name, mfa.py

#!./venv/bin/python

import boto3, pprint

pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=2)
boto3.setup_default_session(
    profile_name="default"
)  # this is optional if profile is "default"
client = boto3.client("sts")

mfa_serial_number = "<enter MFA ARN>"
mfa_totp = "<enter MFA TOTP from device>"

response = client.get_session_token(SerialNumber=mfa_serial_number, TokenCode=mfa_totp)
pp.pprint(response)

Accessing AWS with MFA via CLI was originally published in Noob Techie on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.