A Call from the “Land of the Holy Sands”.. Part 1

Part 1: The longest distance in running is from the ‘bed’ to the ‘floor’
Note: The names of all the people in this series have been changed to protect the identity of the individuals! In spite of this, if there are any name matches, it is purely co-incidental and un-intentional! As they rightly say, “Prewarned is prearmed!”

You know, in India, there are pilgrimage centers, beaches, hill stations, back waters, tourist destinations, et al... and then, there is GOA! A brief look at the holiday calendar for the year 2010 made me shudder and plot an escape from the hullabaloo of day-to-day living. Goa had been calling for a pretty long time and for some reason or the other my telephone line never got connected. Finally ‘Christmas 2009 at Goa’ was a call from Mother Nature that I could not ignore! Then began the planning with its fair share of ‘more-downs-than-ups’ – nature’s way of telling us that “The world is not a bed of roses”. Even until a day prior to the supposed departure we weren’t sure how many people were going! Forget that, even four hours prior to our departure from Mumbai we were not sure how we were travelling! We just knew that no matter what – we were going to Goa!
Even as the rest of Mumbai, at the stroke of midnight, huddled in our churches to celebrate Christmas, we were rushing through every conceivable hurdle to make our trip possible. Two delegates from ex-AP (Krishnan from Andhra Pradesh and SAM from Telengana!) initiated the delay in the departure from Mumbai. We had known that they had departed from Hyderabad but their arrival at Mumbai was still a puzzle! Neither did the news channels talk of a mid-air strike in Hyderabad (how the hell do you enforce a mid-air strike in the first place?!) nor did they talk of any God forbid! ‘natural/man-made’ calamity (all the readers – “Please touch wood!”). So finally, the two Telugu Brahmins arrived safely with their bulging paunches on Mumbai soil... just two hours late! One Acid-test had been passed!
With a few other ‘complementary hurdles’ crossed (even God loves the concept “Buy one, get two/three free!”) we were beginning to see light at the beginning of our Goa tunnel. Finally, it was 2:00 am on the 25th of Dec and we had started for Goa. We had done it! But wait, if 10 adults getting set into the Toyota Qualis for a 14 hour drive was the mystery ‘Da-Vinci Code’, the driver himself was ‘Mona Lisa’s smile’! He was literally travelling at ‘brake-neck speeds’ (someone taught him this wrong spelling resulting in a speed crisis in his life). More than the accelerator he used the brakes! No amount of cajoling/pep talk/appeal/threat could budge the driver from his seat (including an offer to exchange seats with one of the occupants!) Adding to that Mona Lisa mystery was his accent – he would pronounce every ‘S’ as ‘F’... So when he asked you to get your ‘Foot-Kaif’ (Katrina Kaif’s Chinese name?!?), he actually wanted you to pass the ‘Suitcase’. Shahid Kapoor’s character ‘Charlie’ must have taken some inspiration from this ‘Kaminey’! I will return to talk about this guy at a later point in time.
Anyway, the journey began and the 10 specimens inside the Qualis kept themselves busy with light talk. But the journey was no joke! One, because there were 9 human beings and 1 baby-elephant (actually I would rather say ‘elephant in his teens/twenties’) unceremoniously dumped into this Toyota baby called “Qualis”! Two, there was luggage as well (one of the gentlemen in this group from Germany, SET JIT (you will find no trace of ‘Just In Time’ in this JIT...), had brought provisions to last his to-be progeny @ Goa, at least for two-three generations!! Third, it was the speed of the driver! The speed at which we were travelling was too terrifying to even speak of. Every conceivable vehicle had passed by us on the road. Vehicles ranging from the Mercedes, Maruti 800s to our rickety CNG auto rickshaws had shown us as to who was the king of the road... Yet we went on... Forgive me, but at one point in time, I even though I saw an ‘immobile, dilapidated and broken down car’ and a huge tree overtake us! Lastly and perhaps most critically, it was the driver again! Apart from his death-defying speeds (at that speed you cannot even dream/think of dying!), another recurring phenomenon was his tendency to sleep off on the wheel! Why God? Why this? Perhaps the most memorable moments came when we took the ‘midnight/wee hours of the morning’ coffee breaks, when the vehicle came to an absolute halt!
Sometime in the morning we came to this amazing hillock covered in dense fog. Of course, one of the pro-scientific brains in the group, known as Sainath to a few (people say that his brain works faster than a computer!), offered the conclusion that it was a lake! A lake in mid-air??? This Chacha Choudhary should have lived his life with Newton (for sake of clarity I have not changed Newton’s name, for a change)! I swear by the apple that fell on Newton’s head, ‘law of gravity’ would never have seen the light of day! The slow and painful death (journey in that Qualis) resumed, heavier with the intellectual fog that Chacha-jaan had introduced in the minds of the rustic aamchi passengers! Following in quick succession to the ‘fog vs lake’ debate, was a loose motion of intellectual outbursts. Next, it was the driver’s turn at showcasing his intellectual accomplishments. The driver came out with an equally, if not more, stimulating theorem on ‘speed vs distance’. I was left wondering as to why this ‘Einstein’ was just whiling away his time driving cars, that too slowly! No matter what, we were slowly and steadily ‘jogging’ towards Goa...

Zara Hatke Zara Bachke, Yeh Hai Mumbai Meri Jaan...

One of my good friends reminded me about this song when I mentioned about the diversity in Mumbai. Well, after the eventful first day, I was eagerly awaiting the days that would come ahead. The second day began on a relatively expected note. As I got into the appalling traffic, I was flooded with an overpowering feeling of déjà vu. Everything about the streets seemed to be unchanged. It is like the streets of this city are eternally frozen in time and almost every successive day seems to a repeat telecast from the previous day.
Little did I realize that no matter how predictable the entire day seemed, there would still be something about this place that would defy my expectations. So much of the spirit of Mumbai had already been captured by my experience on the very first day itself. What could be more scary than trying to capture a history of centuries in a swish? Yes, later during the day I was hit by an occurrence so hard that it has left an indelible mark in my mind, almost to a point of no return.
Fateful was my tryst with the Mumbai suburban local train! Believe me, it is not an event, it is a phenomenon! No amount of storytelling and Bolly/Holly-wood coverage can ever come close to giving you the real experience of travelling in a local train. Getting into this not-a-fairy-tale train is by no means a joke. Even as one approaches the station, the density of the crowds almost gives one a feeling of stratosphere (low-oxygen-levels). Coming back, it seemed like the entire humanity had conspired to arrive at this particular station on the very fateful day when I had chosen to make my local train debut! I was desperately swimming against the tide of the home-bound rushing Mumbaikars.
Let me deviate for a minute. Even as I was preparing myself for the destined rendezvous with the overpowering phenomenon called Mumbai locals, I had sufficiently managed some background research. I have listed the key findings below:
•The local trains help over 6.6 million people commute on a daily basis!
•The local train routes are spread over 464 kilometers... and people call them local trains....@#$%^&*()!!
•The peak hours (at least 6 to 8 hours every day qualifies as peak time!!) are the most excruciating moments in the life of any travelling passenger – people say it is worse than marriage!!! (no comments)
•The subtle difference between a first class coach and a general coach, apart from the few bucks, is the feeling involved - nothing else. In both the places you get kicked – you could at the best choose between getting kicked by a slipper/foot or by a polished shoe. In both the places your ADA (Aroma Detecting Agent - read as ‘nose’) would be put though stringent testing – either it would be undiluted sweat or a confusing mix of deodorant spray!!!! (I know it sounds disgusting, but yes, ‘Welcome to the Mumbai world’)
Having drained out my inner strength with this disturbing analysis from a ‘friend’ (with trepidation I still choose to call him my friend even after this episode), I summoned my remaining courage to get onto the platform. Once I made it to the platform, life was in automatic mode. I have a feeling that the person who invented the automatic transmission for automobiles had spend considerable/some time on the Mumbai local platforms! All I had to do was stand, the world moved on and it moved on real fast! Trains came and went, some people were moved, others weren’t. Finally, the train that I was to take arrived. Trust me; people were not hanging from the train. The train was trying to hang around the people... I embraced my prized Wipro laptop (fortunately for me, the unfortunate experience of a dear friend had warned me that a lost laptop would make my pocket lighter by Rs. 5,000). The rest of the things were taken care of (like I told you, life was in automatic mode then). I was taken into the train, I was made to stand and I was made to move.
Stations came and went and I was made to create space for incoming and outgoing crowds. The same set of faces continued to hang outside the train, yet the faces inside kept changing! It seemed like people were passing through each other. Finally we approached my destination. All I needed to do was identify the crowd getting down at the station and again things were in the automatic mode. I was brought down from the train, taken towards the exit and was left outside the station near the auto stand, sweating profusely. Apart from the copious amounts of water, I had lost another chunk of my sanity...(after my reverse gear street race - explained in the previous installment). I convinced myself that I had enough of it to last me a lifetime. All those people who commute by those trains every day, I know not how many lives they must be going through in a single lifetime...
You must be wondering why this episode should take such a significant portion of my experiences during the entire week. Well, like I told you before, a Mumbai local is a phenomenon by itself. You should get into it to appreciate what it is like. Moreover, it changed my perspective on things. In short, it was a life changing melodrama that unfolded that day. I swore by the metal in those rail tracks that to the extent possible I would use every excuse in the book to avoid travelling by the famed (rather infamous) Mumbai locals. I have managed, till date... I went through the entire week in a haze, with unique experiences every now and then, which appeared pale in comparison to the harrowing experience that I underwent in the local train!
Allow me to now cover another equally titanic (if not more!) phenomenon in Mumbai. Every shade of lipstick fails and fades away when this creation ‘touches’ their lips. It is the ‘foundation’ that gives every Mumbaikar the fuel to face the daily grind! Well friends, let me introduce you to the Marilyn Monroe of the acting community, the Princess Diana of the ruling community – It is the luscious Vada-Pav! Apart from the fact that everyone wants them, the decisive factor that gives Vada-Pav a higher ranking compared to the other two mentioned similies is that it is ‘available to anyone who wants it’! It is that very good friend which keeps people engaged before they board the trains, during the train journey and as they walk the final distance towards their homes. I have no statistics to showcase the business implications, but my gut feeling says that this has the potential to become another MacD, something on the lines of Chennai’s Saravana Bhavan! (watch out for any Tamilian – their eyes would have popped out with pride on reading the previous line...)
Moving on... If you were to ask me as to what is that one mammoth difference that I see between Bangalore and Mumbai, I would say the word is ‘HOT’! Everything is ‘hot’ here... The weather is definitely hot, the houses are hot, the streets are hot, tempers are hot and well... even the people are ‘hot’ here. Whoever said that “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder!”, well, let me tell you – “In Mumbai, beauty lies in every nook and corner” You can see beauty emerging from the local trains, you can see beauty engrossed in the local kirana shops, you can see beauty gliding through the shopping malls, you can see beauty bargaining (‘fighting’ or ‘negotiating’, whichever you prefer) with the sabji-wala... The moral of the story is that beauty is all around – you just need to keep your eyes open!
The very thought of Bangalore makes me want to go there for a few days... I look at my travel plans and voila – Two weeks have gone by and I am indeed making it to Bangalore this weekend! Not sure if I am excited or not, but for sure I am looking forward to it... Need to take a chill pill for a couple of days and get back charged to this furnace, this gold filtering furnace called Mumbai.

Curtain Raiser – Day 1 @ Mumbai

(This is something that I had written mid way through last year, the time I moved to Mumbai...)
Even as the Jet Airways flight from Bangalore to Mumbai was tearing through the clouds high up in the skies, it kept getting those sporadic convulsions. The flight had given glimpses of what was to come over the next few hours. And true indeed, the first day at Mumbai was not without its fair share of wows and what the @#%$ (four lettered, read as ‘hell’)!
On arrival at the airport, I got the first feel of Mumbai. Having been in Bangalore for some time, I was left hydrated by the heat of Mumbai in no time. My first task (after I had water...) was to look for a taxi. There was a counter offering booking facilities for prepaid taxi services. And it is but natural that on the very first visit to a new city (especially a place like Mumbai) calls for extra precaution (else I would have completed Mumbai Darshan on Day 1!). As a result, the prepaid taxi counter was my preordained destination. I was given two options: Regular taxi or Cool Cab! Of course if you were to give these options to any level-headed someone, I would say at least 8 out of 10 people would opt for the Cool Cab! And yes, I was among those eight!
The entire cab selection was something like an arranged marriage, with the subtle difference being that I hadn’t even seen the cab, forget the other details! I had to walk some distance to get to the cabs and when I got there I could see two sets of cabs – one the ISC (Indian Standard Cab – black and yellow) and the other a ‘cool blue’ colour. Like any sane homosapien, I assumed I had my booking in those Cool Cabs, the blue ones. And no marks for guessing, I got the ISC! What the @#%$?! (the same four alphabets still hold good...)
Now coming to the cab, the bride in this entire marriage affair... Well, if the rendezvous with the ISC was unexpected, shocking was the unveiling of the taxi itself! The cab was none other than the famed relic from prehistoric times – Premier Padmini! Everywhere I turned, I saw these long extinct black and yellow baby dinosaurs. The skeletons of the long buried automobiles must be incessantly turning in their graves at the thought of the immortality of this puny Padmini.
Well, the taxi driver agreed to take me to the guest house (with the promise that he would eventually figure out the way to get there). After some ‘deep delving’ and ‘soul searching’ (we needed to search for the right ‘soul’ who could guide us to our destination!), we managed to figure out the overall route.
That Padmini aroused the seeker in me. It must have borne the brunt of the pot-holed Mumbai roads for not less than 30 years and yet its engine gave the whirr of a teenaged roadster. We tore through the streets with a gusto usually reserved for the technically and commercially far superior cars! And kid me not, those drum brakes worked with such finesse (and a complementary background score/music...) that it would put the disk brakes (and the Bollywood sound editors respectively) of the future generations to shame.
I know you must be wondering why this freak in me is ranting and raving about some stupid cab somewhere. You could blame me for it, but my love for automobiles in general and weakness for outstanding illustrations of automotive engineering in particular are the reasons for this magnum opus on automobiles! I am sorry I need to go on – bear with me for this last paragraph on my metal friends.
So finally we thought that we had reached my destination. However, we were very unceremoniously told that we had over-crossed the destination by an entire street. We went back the entire street at top speed – all the way in reverse gear! Are you really sane? Vehicles were racing past us in a blur and there we were, cruising on reverse gear in a shot taken from some Hollywood flick. By the way, did I say it already? Most of the cabs here do not have the luxury/burden of a rear-view mirror! I emerged from the taxi ride mature and richer by experience and poorer by a few bucks because of the customary “Chai Paani, bhai saab”...
The first thing that struck me about Mumbai was the crowd everywhere. The other thing that fascinated me even more was that there seemed to be a bigger crowd in every successive suburb. Everything and everyone seemed to be in a hurry to ‘move on’, including the afternoon drizzle! The roads were practical examples of the highest level of difficulty in racing games. Surprisingly, there was this mutual respect and trust that I found continuously demonstrated on the roads. At times people made way for the vehicles and at times vehicles made way for people! At times the roads acted as footpaths and at times the footpaths served as fine roads!
Another thing that struck me was the spirit of the place. There were no ‘airs’ about anything – no ‘class and mass’ feeling. Everything seemed to be in sync with everyone and everyone seemed to be running everywhere. I found traders – both lungi-clad vegetable sellers and tie-clad businessmen, huddled around the local ‘chai shops’ chatting away, some waiting for their ‘cutting-tea’ and some creating a smoky halo with their tobacco rolls.
Office was a similar projection of the streets – ‘n’ number of people fighting for ‘n/2’ space! In spite of all these little distractions, work went on and life moved on. The modest dramatics of life went by and I came to the end of my first day at Mumbai. The breezy air conditioning in my guest house accommodation kept me oblivious to the heat and the late sunset outside. There was a clear binary relation running through everything. And I guess that is what makes this place what it is today...

PS: Those of you who have stayed in Mumbai for some time will clearly figure out some significant omissions about Mumbai, say for instance the overflowing trains! But trust me; what I have penned above were the facets of Mumbai that I got to see on Day 1. The others would follow as the days go by...

Welcome to 2010

Even as I was wading through the social networking sites, bang on my profile, I was being asked the question – “What are you up to?” I saw a lot of people had updated posts such as “Happy New Year to all”, “God knows what will come my way in 2010”, “God save me this new year!” and some messages of outright disregard such as “New year – so what’s the freaking deal?” These posts kept me thinking for a while. Well, as far as I see, New Year is a convenient time to carry out extensive post mortems of the year gone by and star gaze through predictions for the year/s to come... No matter what, at the end of the day, life just goes on!
Then comes another New Year tradition where people religiously assume resolutions upon themselves. Phew! What an exercise at caressing the self-introduced overwhelming outpour of human obsession with their imaginary ‘better-selves’! Well, I too belonged to this extremist outfit of traditional ‘annual resolution makers’ but gave up on it because of the historic results from these vain exercises. Don’t get me wrong on this - the spirit of making resolutions for personal betterment is not something I am against! What I despise is the continued use of this exercise as a mere mental cushion to convince oneself that ‘a step taken in the right direction bodes well for oneself’. What people forget is that more often than not that very first step ends up becoming the last step as well! It is this turn of events that I so much deride.
Perhaps the only thing that I have wished upon myself to do the entire year is – “Have fun! Live life to the fullest!” It is definitely easier said than done. Most of the human race is hurling fervently towards death forgetting the most important thing in life – to live! We live the life that others want us to live; we create an illusionary persona and delve so deep that our real identity faces a crisis! We live our lives according to the terms set by the world. And we say “It’s my life”? What on earth does that mean?Anyway that’s enough of whining that I have done! The quintessence of this entire exposition is that I have to live life to the fullest, on my own terms. No radical thoughts here – just the simple dictum that I will enjoy everything that I do and do everything that I enjoy (in no particular order). 2010 – here I come!

Enter 2010!

I have made only two entries during the entire year 2009. I had a total of only four posts during 2008. That too after deciding to write more frequently! God save me...