Bhavnagar Express

Travelling alone in an off season train was something new. The kind of crowd was totally different from that of the vacation season. The trains then are filled fully with either people travelling with anticipation about some holiday trip or people coming back from one. And hence the mood inside is always very upbeat. This time the train had an older population (there was only one person younger than me in the whole boogie). There were businessmen travelling home, grandmothers visiting their kids and others who had specific reasons for their travels.

In my compartment there was one woman who looked like my grandmother and another woman who looked like her mother ( i mean quiet old) though she looked beautiful( looked like a character directly taken out from the malgudi days). First the older lady stares at my reader’s digest which i was reading. I thought of offering her another copy of reader’s digest that i had, for her to go through the pictures in that but thought it might sound humiliating. Then this older lady tries striking a conversation with me but realises it fast that telugu is not my thing. Then she tries asking me in her broken Hindi about what i do and stuff. She looked very amused when i told her that i was studying engineering. It was really great to be able to converse with her.

Then there was another old lady who was having a seat along with me in the side births and i happened to have the lower birth. As soon as i entered, i started to feel sleepy and i didn’t have anything else to do. So i offered to take that lady’s upper birth and went to sleep. Little did i realise then that the selfish offer of taking the upper birth would be so revered by her (i guess she was planning to ask me to take the upper birth herself some time later). The rest of the night, the lady and her son(must have been in early 30s) did all they could to show their gratitude. From enquiring about my dinner arrangements to offering a banana which they bought from a station, i was more of a guest to them than a co-passenger. Finally they were about to get down at Kalyan Jn. (Mumbai) at 4:30early morning. It was raining. My sleep broke and i offered to carry their luggage till the gate( it included all sorts of stuff... clothes, oil cans, utensils fruits etc.). Just before they were to alight in kalyan, the guy gave me his phone number and asked me to give him a call whenever i come to Mumbai. My sarcasm and laziness to save the number compelled me to tell him “Dude!!! Do you think i am going to give you a call”. Though i realised that it was the only way he could thank me for helping with the luggage. I just waved him and his mother goodbye and came back to my compartment. Now was it was a time of rendezvous with a Marwari businessman.

By the time i came back to my compartment it was 5:30 and i had enough of sleep and i thought of taking a cup of tea. When i asked a chai wala to give a cup of tea ( on trains its an immiscible mixture of milk, water, sugar syrup and tea powder) the guy on the upper birth asked for one too. I gave the tea guy 10 bucks and he thought it was for both of us and so he went away. Now a wave stuck this Marwari chap. After giving me 5 bucks we got into some gen conversation. He was my only co-passenger till the end of the journey.

By the time i reached Ahmedabad i was really bored. Off season train journeys are no fun.

A few hours in Ahmedabad

After a 24 hour journey in train, i halted at Ahmadabad for a few hours before leaving home. The start of the wait was excruciating, having to stand in the railway station, waiting in the swarm of people. Firstly the junta, including me, were chased of the station lobby and then i survived a life threatening scare of raining stones from the station building. The wait was prolonged when i had to stand in front of vipin’s(my old good friend) apartment for another hour.

But the wait was fruitful for sure coz the rest of the three hours i ended up spending with vipin and prabuddh( another old good school friend) was really great. One good thing that i happen to share with my school friends over bitsian friends is a sense of openness and an absence of sanity.

We dropped off for a cup of coffee at a cafe in the backyard of some building opposite IIM campus. The place is supposedly owned by some mobster and serves one hell of a coffee. I don’t know whether its just me, but i always think coffee and conversations really go along well.

After a stroll we went to this place called zodiac (the ambience was themed on zodiac signs) for our dinner. For a head start, vipin is one person who can get you embarrassed because of his actions in all possible ways and in any place. And he was on his peak that day. Over and above using cheap filthy language( i mean, come on, you can use English for a change even in filth if the locale asks you to) he even made us listen to his poems. When a group of girls came and sat on the next table, he pointed towards them and shouted out “dekha!!!”(trying to point out that Ahmadabad ranks high on face value of females). He summed it all up by stealing the waiter’s tip by reasoning that it is already included in the bill.

At the end of the dinner we left and i boarded my bus back home. But i really cherished the moments i spent with the two remembering the happy old school days and our coaching class.

Gufaa

Ha so one more week over. And EXEX showed its face again this weekend. For your vocabulary’s sake EXEX stands for Expenditure Explosion. Till now i faced exex mostly during our college fests and saw it peak during our department trip to Delhi. But after coming to Hyd, exex has become a weekly affair( rather a weekend affair)and has stuck to me like a pest. And the last weekend was the heights when i spent 3 quarter of a grand on just appetitory pleasures and mind you, i am a teetotaller.

Sunday dinner was at Ohri’s, the best eatery chain in Hyd. And this time we were for a cave experience. The dining place had a cave setting. It looked remarkable. After ‘trying’ to put up something like a cave as a structure last oasis(sorry mojo for being blunt), i must say that this place looked very much like a cave. Other than the rocky walls( plaster of paris i guess) , hanging fire torches and chains along with the dim lighting gave it a complete gothic aura.

To top it all, the waiters had a shikari shambu (does it ring a ‘tinkle’) attire. The menu was like any other high end restaurants with confusing dishes and poverty inducing prices. The food was nothing too special, was good enough.

In all the gufaa was worth an experience.

The Hexagon

More than half a month is over of my stay in Hyderabad. Well the most intriguing of the things here has been our interactions with the autowallahs. More about that in the next post.

                First of all the intro of the people who are concerned with the next post.

 

 

Abhinav- a geek from ’06 batch. His interest in movies( wasn’t it robotics some time back?) brought him here. He says he will be working under a gult director. But since the last 10 days he has done nothing but watched scores of movies and gave rest of us his piece of mind and intelligence. Tell you what his ideas are dangerous to the society, an anti social in the making :P .

 

Anshul – i don’t know how many of you would have noticed him in the music night but the next time you go for please spare one sight for this winnie the pooh lookalike standing like a fielder in slip position, but behind a keyboard. A wanna be rockstar, is presently getting medicated in his PS station along with his sweetheart Arun. An addict with the guitar, spends endless torturous ( for us) hours ‘picking up’ songs.

 

Phani – an instant hit with the girls in his PS mostly because of his gult identity. After a brawl with Arun in the very first night, he admitted that he got caught up with the wrong people. Sorry buddy there is no escape. He right now has a crush on the sofa in our room. Usually comes back from his PS with a lighter wallet after burning of money in McDs, subway, ohri’s, satya sai tiffin centre and what not (mrinal at fault). We have even composed a song on him “mera ek dost he jiska naam he Phani”.

 

Mrinal – he is the mother of our household. He has got some really liking for mangoes. Spends most of his time with his guitar and plays naagin over and over again, trying to catch the attention of the female population in the opposite building. He managed one of the girls to take more than half an hour in drying clothes. I seriously don’t understand the secret of his X factor. He has a big database about all the religions and cults of this world. I don’t know how much of it sensible, but his intensity about knowledge spreading is so high that he took time out to explain what bible is all about to me.

 

Arun – we usually don’t see his weekend edition coz he runs away to his uncle’s place almost always. Supposedly he is teaching his cousin. This guy has got some nick in filth word diction. We are really fond of the moments when he gets into a bad words escapade. He has some allergy with water and rarely takes bath even after visiting the drug plants. Please come back Arun, Anshul is missing u a lot.

 

And ofcourse the sixth edge is me. More in the next post.

dvitiya varsh

A good start is half work done and all is well that ends well. Strangely nobody talks about what happens in the middle. After surviving the most violating series of tests i am suddenly reminded that its half time for my bitsian life. What is most amazing is that i have heard almost all bitsians say that any given sem is faster than the previous one. Even i affirm to this totally unscientific notion.

                Second year has been a mix of good and bad, complete joblessness and unscalable schedules, As and Cs(missed a D), the big chill and inedible mess food, chilly nights and the energy sapping hot afternoons, the foggy days, the cloudy evenings, the amazing oasis(headbanging, cave, KGs poetry sessions etc), BOSM(fooseball...), APOGEE, delhi trip, khetri, daily runs for mt classes, single room, sworn on by the supree who used the F word, running in the night with my lappy when it rained cats and dogs( elephants too), let there be light .... and much more. In all it was a totally different experience from the first year.

Things have passed. Half time as i said. And the young lad who came into this campus two years back finds himself more insane than ever. I feel damned to use this cliché but yes time does fly.

 1-1 was a time of showing thadi. A time, when the echo of my own id no. from seniors, used to put me up on some imaginary pedestal (because my id no started with zuk which fascinated people ...why the hell). The 1-1 CG card was a slap on the face which still echoes. I guess this is the story of half of the a7ites, the other half is a sad lot. Next year horrifies me of CDCs and i really want to join that sad lot. In the middle of sudden void in the schedule, i am forced  to write this completely arbit post. 1 month of survival and then the half time will be official. Looking forward to it.

Yeh Delhi he mere yaar

The dryness and dullness of APOGEE by the 4th day and the mess exploited tongues forced the secret seven( well there is neither anything secret about the seven nor did we go and solve secrets, it just sounds cool) to flee from this campus for a day. The question was where, and after much thinking, discussing, deliberating, pleading, we decided on the closest feasible destination. Delhi. The voyage started with the seven of us doing a disappearing act. Not more on this. Big brother is watching :P. It was 7 of us ... rather 6 n a half... Barbie, mojo, d2, cow, mcbhat(i would like to propose a new name for him...metro), me and of course the person who made the number non integral... pinky.

After some nerve racking minutes, we finally left pilani at around 3. The wait for a train in the midnight at a railway crossing in loharu was so childishly appealing. Then we got on to a really deserted route to delhi. And then we started with the ceremonial ghost story sessions featuring headless man, lady with totally white eyes, dejavu , dreams etc and the best being the one in which the lady ran alongside a car at 120kmph.

At around 5:45 the vehicle stopped at some dhaba. After a cup of tea our spirits were back in full throttle. From Gurgaon till the end of our destination, there was a series of songs murdered by us... starting from the “dinga dinga dinga dinga......” of rang de basanti. As this was my first trip to Delhi ( rather second, my mom told me that my first birthday was celebrated in Delhi... strange piece of trivia), i was really glad that i got to see the best parts of delhi at first.

Destination 1 was India Gate. It was morning 7 and the place looked so majestic. We werent content enough from taking pics. After some time when our stomach started sending signals to brains and so we went in search for food and reached Connaught place at some 8 30.

As it was too early, no shop had opened till then and we could do nothing but gaze at the closed doors of countless McDs, pizzahuts, dominoes, CCDs, subways, KFC, subway, baristas etc. That was when we decided to take a metro ride to kashmiri gate and grab something to eat. We reached that place and reached a McD outlet. Our mental state was similar to war refugees. But in the greed of eating i (anvi was more responsible) ended up wasting a chicken burger.... utterly outrageous... can’t forgive myself for that :P.

In the meanwhile we didn’t notice that psychological impact caused by the metro ride on rohit. He persuaded us hard to drive on the red metro line. But coz he is tall and big, his childish tantrums were given no notice. We took a ride back to Connaught place.

It was 9:45 and the shops were still closed. We decided to go to red fort. After going through the monument we sat down in one of the gardens inside. It was then that Barbie started flirting with ... u know what.... a lawn mower . After doing that for some 20 minutes and realising the futility of his efforts, we finally left red fort to fill our tummies ... again :).

We found a way through the roads of chandini chowk(delhi6) to reach parawathe vali gali (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gali_paranthe_walee). We went inside one of the shops and i was totally taken aback after looking at the menu. The varities of parawthe offered were unimaginable. We tasted 8 of them (paneer, rabdi, mirchi, mixed, gajar, poodina, papad and kharchin) followed by a big glass of lassi. The food was just amazing.

From there we left for Connaught place again. This time it was alive and active. We went inside the palika bazaar. We found people selling 250GB pendrives. There was another place which was giving out 3 tshirts for 100 bucks( Rs33.33 per tshirt). In the middle of this we won a bargaining fight for anvi. There was a weighing machine also and we found that anvi’s weight is half that of rohit :P. After this, KG joined us and we took the metro to go to rohini to reach the adventure and the joy on rohit’s face was radiating coz we had to travel on the red line. We reached rohini and had to wallk through some open land and around stinking waters to reach adventure island ( which was described by rikhsaw vaala as “chote bacho ke khelne ke jagah).

After taking the tickets, we went inside and went directly to an insanely scary ride (atleast for me,d2, Barbie and kg to some extent) called side winder. The craze of anvi towards this was too much. After her third trip over that there were speculations that anvi’s brain has taken a 180 degree turn inside and that she will start painting and will forget coding in C. In that place we also met one of the most impolite person that i have seen who refused to take our group pic(poor d2).

We left that place and rode back in the metro to reach CP. We took our cab and then KG directed us to heavenly hell. It was the Khan Market and we went in to a cafe to get chilled out. It was the BIG CHILL. We ordered a round of desserts. The prices were like a slap on the face( we took it delightfully...it costed us 100 bucks per head). What surprised us even more was the size of chocolate mudpie and the cheese cake that we ordered. It wasn’t big enough to even have a mouthful. But it was just too yummy. So much so, that the discussions in the drive from there to Gurgaon was totally based on that.

After burning holes in our pockets, there was a sudden realisation of the wickedness of the tongue. Barbie was especially disturbed by this. The fund of big chillu(the hole) by cow... the poem... Barbie calling chote bache harami... everything happened in this while. But the fundamental problem still remained... we were still hungry :). After dealing with our upset driver, we made our way to the malls in gurgaon and got split up for KFC and Pizza hut. After burning our pockets a bit more, we left gurgaon at some 11 for pilani. It was a really tiring job to keep atleast one person awake next to driver. With some brave acts from saransh, ajay and rohit the driver could be kept awake. This driver had a unique set of songs like any other driver. It had comments on the songs as interlude. With tired body and mind we finally reached pilani at 3oclock completing exactly 24 hours of maverickism. We had to do the appearing act this time. Finally the trip came to an end.

Thanks to a lovely weather, planless decisions and the wittiness of the secret seven which made 27 march 2009 a special day and the trip a no regrets trip.