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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...
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...
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