Its mid April, and all I've been thinking is coming up with a sensible post . Nah :(

Teasing the teaser
It was some months back.Some Saturday afternoon.I had got up in the bus from my stop and got a window seat. A couple of stops later, a man got up , and sat beside me.A few minutes later he started behaving as if I'm his newly wed wife, putting his hands around the seat and odd stuffs suchlike.So. I turned towards him and asked him to behave properly.He called back his hands and tried to sit properly, though he kept pushing inside.I was on the verge of praying to God that this chap gets down somewhere near, when he called the conductor and got a ticket for Park Street. Gosh!
Now I thought that I was wasting the window seat by thinking about this idiot and started looking outside.Now again this man started pushing and trying to put his hand around.That was too much , I thought.Even the most wild billi of mine listens to me, but this man was worse. I just turned towards him, and said, "Why can't you just behave properly??" I don't remember whether there was something exceptional in my tone. The man said, "S-sor-ry" and promptly ran out of the bus. The place was some 8 km away from Park Street!

In the family
At times I wonder why both of my parents are engineers?
I tell you why.
On a recent trip to a seaside holiday, in the train. Conversations.
Me and my brother , as usual and as expected, talking crap.
-"Hey see those lotus leaves in the pond".
-"Hey remember how we used to count cows on our way to Jamshedpur?"
-"Not me idiot, you and Mithudidi used to."
-"What are those scarecrows made up of?"

Now my Mom gets excited seeing something.
-"What are those? Beside the scare crows?How come the utility poles are so wide apart? Doesn't that violate the norms?"
Now my father steps in.
-"Thats a three-phase leakage transformer, right? Its okay, you can't expect better mounting, at least in villages."
-"Last dat I was checking the 98B clause of the Electricity Act,it does mention the implementation of APDRP. blah blah.
And this the general scenario everywhere, in the dining table, in the car :(


Beginner's guide to Bargaining
3 simple steps: (from a Mtv program)
1> Shock shock shock---> Whatever price you are told at the beginning, just convey to the man , that you are simply shocked by the high price.
2>Know your maths---> You need to be really quick.
3>Half is full---> Remember this thumb rule. Even if you can't gauge the exact price of the product , just bring it down to half an your job is quite done.

No Eureka
Most of the cities have banned people from sitting beside the autowallah in an autoride. I don't mean to sound like robbing a privilege though.Now suppose you are sitting either on the right or left of the autowallah and the auto takes a winding turn.Are you going to fall towards the autowallah or will have a possibility of falling outside.
On this futile note I end this post :(

As somebody said, if the world's people are to be divided into 2 classes, one possible pair would be morning person and night owl.
"The morning people feel superior to those who trust the sun to rise on its own,and like to tell them so."
My history of morning walks dates back to my pre teen and early teen days when I used put alarm in the tiny alarm clock , made no fuss about getting up early , and merrily went out for walks with my father , even on chilly winter mornings.
Then alarm clocks replaced mobile phone alarms, morning walks made their way to getting up early and mugging up books or those 5 minutes sleep requests in winter.

So what triggered the second season of my morning walks is
(i) I've been getting bizarre dreams of plane crashing on my roof, anacondas in the nearby pond, lions and tigers roaming in the neighbourhood park and these dreams break exactly around 4:30 am ,thus terminating my sleep.
(ii)my mom's constant hammering on the head with "do some exercise" slogan.
(iii)a love story heard from a friend: "You do jogging really well" -was how the guy first complemented her.
So, I go for morning walks alone, I don't have a doggie in my company.So, obviously all I tend to do is notice people and things around.

People: you have the grandpas talking about freedom struggle, how life without inflation was. You have the ladies , who even in the wee hours, don't forget to discuss the saas-bahu serials , how disobedient their progenies have become and how late they return home.You have the uncles , who have 4km walk daily advice in their prescription charts. Coming down to the younger age bracket, guys and gals are hard to find.All one spot are groups playing cricket in nearby grounds or young lads taking driving lessons in yet-to-be-busy roads.

Nature around is pretty pleasant.Red and yellow flowers dot the trees, bushes.And you get to hear the crow's cry clearly, unburied under the noises of car horns.You have the nascent sun peeping out of the clouds, unperturbed by the presence of the dimmed remnants of last night's moon.Cool breeze, colourful surroundings, interesting people make your walk uncomplaining.

So, no matter how many times I hit the snooze button before getting up, no matter how I complain about having to open all the locks of the house, no matter how often my mom keeps complaining that these walks are not having any effect on my energy level, I've again fallen in love with the walks after years.

Preeti's post excited me to write something about the string of train journeys I had to take off late and have been grumbling about them till date.

With very high hopes and faith in the omnipotent God , I brave the unruly mob of people crowded in front of the reservation charts , only to be provided with the fact that people around are m46, f41, m12, m76, f13, watever !
Okay, now lets say the train has started moving, the coolies have said byebye. Here comes the time, when you actually notice the kind of people with whom you are going to spend the next 24 hours of your life.
1. the sleepy kinds-The very first thing they do after boarding the train is to eye the upper berths.Even if they are not allotted the upper berth , they would coax the fellow passengers for an exchange offer and would immediately doze off after getting up.

2.The most noisy group in the train non arguably is the mother-kid combo-This section can be further classified:
i)The mother of an infant- they would run to the loo a billion times, cleaning utensils, washing clothes, to bathe the kid, to wash his face, to brush his teeth , to change his clothes, then would play snakes and ladder and so on!
ii)The mother of kids in the age group of 10-14--"you have an exam na? after the school reopens? wait, let me , take out your books for you to study, i've kept them handy"
"No mommm, please I will look out of the window for now"
"Nooo, you are not a kid anymore, there's nothing to look out of the window, its quite dark"
"yeah, mom, thats what I like, the lights glowing with darkness all around, mom are those will-o-wisp?"
"Shut up, study, here's your book".

3.Then there will be some men who would leave all the places in the train and find the space before the loos the most comfortable. And you would have to say "excuse me" a thousand times to get it registered in them.

4.This kind of people really gets on my nerves-they need to change clothes on the train , that too in full public glare. Men and women, in only a one night journey can't you really sleep in whatever you are?

And from Delhi , we took the Rajdhani. More than anything else its known as the train which serves you food on board.
So, 30 mins into the journey, a kid break the silence "Papa you, told they will serve us chocolates..when?"
I'll hate Rajdhani for serving me apple juice 4 times.

I never knew I would get my my much craved respect for my existence, in land miles away from home.
Once, while getting out of the Rashbehari metro station in Kolkata, a lady had asked me, "Girl, which gate should I take for the way towards Kalighat Temple? "
To which I had replied ,"I don't know, why don't you ask the policeman out there?"
"you don't know? Why ?? Have you not been to that place? you people stay in this city and still don't know??" and blah blah till I escaped from the site of lady yelling and lots of confused onlookers.

But in Delhi things were different. People asked me whether to take blue line or yellow line metro for Chandni Chowk, which way to take for reaching the front gates of Appu Ghar, whether to get down at Mandi house or Brakhamba road for Connaught Place. And a couple of foreigners asked about the Mughal hierarchy while visiting the Humayun's tomb. And thank God, I could answer !

Then there were those security checks . In really long queues
.
My eyes were really moist while going through the Indira Gandhi Memorial museum. Reading her personal notes in difficult times, of what she went through each time while losing elections, while being expelled, about her joy of motherhood, her pains of losing near and dear ones.
At the end of the day, she was a woman afterall.

And then I went to Sarojini to check whether I do possess any bargaining skills or not.

The green and red buses on road were real eyecatchers. The best part was that they have their numbers displayed at the back. If you running after buses , you can be sure about it, in that way.
Here, kids yelled "Ab plane Qutub Minar ke andar ghuss jayegaa"

My father’s office tour took us to a hydel power station at the border of West Bengal and Jharkhand.
This being my first train journey since watching ‘Jab We Met’ , so..you know…expectations and imaginations were really running high !
But unlike the movie, the train was not at all empty, it was full of a shit people. The women were running around wearing a whole lot of jewellery and men in their shorts and vests!
Man! This is only a one night journey and the train compartment is no way your bedroom !so , please..
The train was another crap character, stopping at every damn station…
Ok, finally after a bad night’s sleep admist cacophony contributed by kids yelling, people fighting over their seats, TTs shouting on the top of their voices, we finally reached the station..
So for the past 3 days , I have been

* Watching village girls and women passing by merrily , clad in clothes of brightest possible colours !

*Visiting the hydel power plant. Its Asia’s largest pumping project, done in collaboration with Japan.
Construction wise, it had an upper dam, lower dam and the usual switch gears,lock gates, turbine chamber, control rooms.
This visit made me realize how vast the difference between theoretical knowledge and practical experience is. I did not have the slightest hint how huge a transformer can be and what complexities it can have in its construction, whose circuit diagram we draw at one go of the pen!
The job in the field and control rooms involve a lot of expertise and tension.

*Visited the ‘Charak mela’…this ‘mela’or fair held in the villages of West Bengal for the last 3 days of the Bengali year, is all about fanatics and faith at its extreme.
People walk barefoot on burning coal,jump bare bodied on sharp iron rods, dangle a child with his body pierced brutally, from the top of a huge stick, hurting oneself in the name of god, and to top it all, on the final night they have 300-400 slaughterings.
The traditional ‘Chau nach’ is probably the only creative aspect of the fair.

*Ram navami was also slated then, when the streets came to standstill with people displaying fights with sticks and swords.

*Our driver took us to a place where bangles of hand made from ‘gala’ . it involved lot of persevearance and creativity. From next time, I go shopping , I’ll try not to bargain for handicraft goods. Their prices are justified.

*Walked the village roads in the mornings,chased herds of goats, took snaps with calves, ate at dhabas of truck wallahs in the afternoon , and counted stars in the evening lying on the terrace of our guest house!

Then , again, there was the inevitable train journey.
This time around, the journey was smooth, if I ignore the fact that the train was running only 4 hours late.i thank the sudoku in my mobile for helping me pass my time in the station.

So back to Calcutta. The taxi breezed fast over the Howrah bridge. There’s some thing in it. Whether it’s the architectural marvel, or the fact that it bridges such a wonderful city….but everytime I see the bridge..it does something to me.....

Carefree outings, free of hurries & worries ,in the lap of nature or being lost among the forts & fortresses, spending exclusive time with family—admist all these, there can be disappointments—In the past 19 years of my life, I have travelled to several places-from north to south- from west to east—each trip had its own share of joy and disenchantments!
Here’s some:
1.> so near yet so far---that was the exact situation when we went to agra after a fortnight long trip in Rajasthan. We had set aside only one day for Agra and that was a fateful Monday! (Monday blues following during outings too) To make things clear, Monday is(or was) the day when the Taj mahal is closed for public viewing. Goshh! It was really hard to swallow the fact , that we are in Agra and still will not be able to visit the Taj!! We encounterd a group of foreigners (who told us that it was their 8th consecutive visit to the Taj Mahal, how I envied them!!) .They took a path from the back side of the monument and soon we were on the banks of the Yamuna with the Taj in a transverse way. our only consolation was that particular bank was the place where Aishwarya Rai had danced in the film Jeans !

2> if the ‘visiting-agra-yet-not-being-able-to-visit-taj was not an enough blunder for this trip, here ‘s more…my mom had packed 6 of my new dresses in a bag and I was using it as a pillow . its thickness was enough for it to slip out of the window, and that’s exactly what happened! Its been almost 9 years and I still cannot forget the pain of losing 6 dresses!

3> it was around 6 pm and no sign of buses in the bus stop. After sometime, a policeman came and informed us ,that a riot has occurred on the highway so curfew has been imposed for 48 hours. shit! So our trip to Rameshwaram was not going to happen .how many times have I not fantasized about the ‘vanar senas’ constructing the bridge and how in my silly mind I had imagined that I would be able to see Srilanka from Rameshwaram ! so it was a great disappointment!

4> from 1:30 pm in the afternoon to 6:15 pm in the evening—well, this was the time we were stuck in the queue to visit Tirupati—quite a stress ,considering I was only 10 and my bro 6!
5> it was the majestic Ajanta & Ellora caves and there we made a blunder ! I was too young to understand why photography is prohibited and clicked! The result?? Our whole camera reel was taken away ! which has snaps of other places we visited!
6> back from our trip to goa, we decided to do some sight seeing in Bombay since our train was at 8:15 pm and we had plenty time. But rain god had other plans, it rained rainded, making us stranded in the station for the whole day. To top it, our train was running 8 hours late!

7>the weather gods did not show any mercy either during our 5 day stay in Darjiling. water showed all its forms-- be it as clouds floating by our hotel window, as rain spoiling our sunrise view, or as heavy fog blocking the view of kanchenjungha peak !!