6117

I was driving back home at around 8 pm a few days back, in fact to be exact, on 31st July, after a really long tiring Saturday, with lots of multi tasked work and weekday-pressure-spilt-over-weekend. Work that should have taken ten minutes took half an hour, work that should have started was not even remotely close to starting and work that was planned to have been completed was nowhere near the end.

Above all these, I was damn sleepy!

About my current sleep pattern -

The more I sleep, the sleepier I feel.

The less I sleep, the sleepier I feel!

I ALWAYS FEEL SLEEPY!

So there I was on my pep, trying to safely-drive-rashly (yes, I find rash fast driving very soothing, but I tend to drive cautiously all the same, n hence I call it a safe-rash-drive), when I saw something that made me smile.

I have this habit of looking at the cars, if a really royal cool looking car, look at the driver (it is my belief that the coolest of cars mostly get horrible looking drivers) and any vehicle, look at the license plate to check out the numbers and their pattern.

So back to my story, I saw a really cool Honda City, in royal red color. But I did not even go to look at the driver, coz I was too busy staring at the license plate. It was 6117.

6117…

That was my first year’s room number. 6th block, ground floor room no 17. 6117.

It brought an instant smile on my face, and brought back a series of memory flashes. I had shared the room with a Delhiite, who hated South Indians, esp. Tamilians.

We hardy used to talk to one another, since both of us were a part of totally different worlds and had complete different attitudes and absolutely no roads crossing each other’s paths. But surprisingly, we kind of got along pretty decently.

I was thinking of all these things when an Innova crossed my track, with the number plate 6320, my third year room!! Boy, would you call that a titanic coincidence or what?

6th block second floor room no 20. That was the best year, my third year.

Filled with hopes of future and beliefs in present and loads of extracurricular activities and positions and fun in labs, lots n lots of friends and what not!

I just can’t remember the last stretch of my drive home. I was drowned my pensieve filled with memories of my past, my insides happy and sad at the same time.

I am afraid I might never, you know, be there, ever again.

Last July 31, our ID cards expired and we officially became the BITS Alumni. This July 31, it was like the world was reminding me about my one year of having been a part of BITS Alumni.

I was truly overwhelmed and came back home and watched a couple of college videos. I truly felt like back in Summer of 2004. :)

Yelagiri Part II

Do you know that climbing down hill is exponentially more difficult than climbing up? Yeah.. we had heard about it too, but got to experience it in Yelagiri.

At least on our up-way, we were able to control out movements and the thorny bushes. While climbing down, the thorns were as much of a problem as the gravity! And the place was becoming cloudy and dark so fast, and the guide kept taunting us by barking like a wolf or a bear now and then when She, the meek docile female, immediately clung on Her who in turn held to Her-Bf for her life. It was hilarious when the guide hid behind the rocks and I went a little ahead on the path. They followed me, trying to wrench their way out of some bushes, when the Guide jumped out of the rocks on them barking and freaked them all totally! She was nearly going to have a heart failure! :D We all reached the resort, laughing big time about it.

We were back just in time for dinner, all feeling so great about our achievement, and planned for a night safari in the jungles too. But sadly it started raining so heavily, that we could go, as the resort owners said that there would be too many poisonous snakes prowling and the forest was not exactly a neatly paved tar road with neon lights, and they were bound to be extremely slippery. So we didn’t really want a snake hanging on our framed-photos instead of flowers and just went back to our rooms and slept soundly.

The next morning was one big comedy. Before I go on with that, there is a side track you should know.

Yelagiri is the name of the entire mountain as such, which includes a number of villages (basically just a few houses put together) once every few kilometers. Our resort was in Athanavur, the biggest ‘town-with-an-ATM’, with a single road with about ten or so shops here and there, and the rest of the buildings were other resorts. So the previous day, we decided to go cycling in the mountain side in the early morning, in the cool breeze. Aaah, it all sounded so good… But trust me, BAD IDEA!

We had gone to one of the other resorts- Yathri Nivas, and booked three cycles for rent at 30 bucks/hour/cycle (She couldn’t ride, so we all took turns in taking her doubles). We picked up the cycles at 8 in the morning, with the idea of returning it by 9. Horrible planning!

It was awesome fun while riding downhill. The cycles were completely out of control, moving at like a 100 km/hr (or so it felt) and there were 2 hairpin bends too, where gravity overtook our breaks and even I started praying (funny, when science and rationality lets us down, the only thing anyone can do is call the ‘God’), but well, I could hear Her screaming out to Her-Bf with her hands and feet in the air, and Her-Bf too was helpless and in quite the same state.

We could come to a stop after half an hour of the downhill slide, our hands and feet and all wrong parts were all sour and we all wanted a break. We found this small rocky hill in the side, and decided to lock our cycles in the roadside and climb it. Later after a 45 min climb up and down, we kind of didn’t know which way to take to return, We couldn’t take the way we came coz It was too steep to climb on cycle, but a passerby told us that the other way would lead us to our resort after some 2-3 hours!

We decided to take the route we came and climbed. The cycles started rolling backwards, downhill even when we were putting in all our energy trying to peddle the other way! We got freaked, and decided to push it and hopefully reach the city within an hour. The sun was soaring up and we were barely prepared for such a scorching heat. We didn’t have a cover for the head, not a bottle of water. The place was completely desolated from any civilization and we were stuck, without as much as a tree to take shade, in the middle of nowhere, unable to climb the steep mountain roads, with or without the cycles. We found some rocks under some bushes in the side of a huge valley, and decided that we couldn’t take one step more, and sat down, waiting for someone to walk by to guide us.

So there we were sitting in the valley side not knowing what to do, when a shepherd, an old lady sympathized with us, took out her Nokia handset called the auto-stand in Athanavur, told them to get a tempo big enough to accommodate four people and three cycles and thanks to her, a tempo with an open back arrived to our rescue! We piled up the cycles, stood like politicians in the back of the tempo and in the scorching sun and three cycles tied in front of us and no place to hold to, we climbed the mountains thus! What a roller coaster!

We returned the cycles at around 12 noon, completely exhausted in the heat, went back to our resort, washed up, ate our lunch, played chess (and FYI, almost won) and finally, took back a cab to the station at 3pm. The return journey was pretty uneventful, in the train filled with bickering and bitching families and irritating mamas n mamis.

But as we returned home with sour legs and sun burnt hands and tanned faces, we were thinking… What a weekend!!

Yelagiri Trip - Part I

The talk of a trip had been going on for quite some time now. With parents, sister, friends, colleagues… They all mostly vanished after the planning stage. After Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Bikaner and Jodhpur, Darjeeling, Sikkim and Nepal, I now got a chance to take a weekend off in Yelagiri.

About approximately 350 km away from Chennai, Yelagiri is supposedly a hill station. I had expected something like Ooty, cool and commercial, but it wasn’t. It was as hot as 9 am or 4 pm in Chennai, not as sweaty and irritating though. There was a cool breeze all through the day, compensating for the hot sun.

The trip as it is wasn’t exactly a ‘planned’ one. It was more like a last minute idea. Wednesday morning, we discussed about how nice a trip would be, Wednesday evening, we browsed and thought of Yelagiri, Thursday morning we booked the tics in tatkal to Jolarpet (Thanks to pathetic speed of irctc at 8 am, managed to get only waiting list tics), Thursday evening called some resorts and ended up getting one- Auro Ville with two single rooms available and booked it, Friday morning booked the return tics to from Jolarpet to Chennai again in tatkal, Friday evening left office at 9.30 pm, went home and slept off, got up at 4 am on Saturday, got dropped off in central station by dad at 5.15 am.

The unconfirmed onward tics were the least of our problems. The seats actually got confirmed, and we all, Me, She, Her and Her-Bf successfully boarded the train at 6 am. Our main impending problem was the fact that Her father did not know about Her-Bf coming along with us. She had told him that the fourth person was a girl named ‘Divya’, whose seat was in some other coach. So Her inquisitive father came and sat with us until the train started, and enquired about the ‘fourth girl’ and about her seat and where she was n all. Little experience that I had in lying, my BP was rising with every question of his. After a point, I just got up and went outside in the pretext of getting water, and returned only as the train started moving!

Phew!

Her-Bf came and sat with us only after the train left the station and the coast was clear. We got introduced, had our breakfasts (She thought she could survive on biscuits) talked about everything from religious beliefs, purity of Ganges (much to the irritation of the old mama n mami sitting with us in the same bay) to office politics and movies & series. We then played rummy and ace, and finally reached Jolarpet about an hour late.

As we had missed the bus that was supposedly at 9.45 am, we took a share auto for 300 bucks and climbed the mountain at the speed of ooty toy train. On the up side, we got to take a lot of snaps on the way.

We finally reached the resort, got freshened up, had lunch, made friends of Nala (the dog), and fixed up a guide for trekking.

 

We started at about 4.30 pm from the resort and went into jungles in the mountains. IT WAS AWESOME! Initially, we were all so highly enthused and the slopes were quite easy to walk on. We went on taking loads of snaps and enjoying every small thing like the touch-me-not (or so we think) leaves, and watching huge termite hills and everything.

  

Our guide was equally enthused about climbing the mountain with three girls (and a guy :P), and taught us to suck nectar out of small flowers, to walk on wood splinters on the ground without falling on them and getting killed, showed us the holes that bears had dug to eat the roots, dead scorpions, how soft the nest of birds felt and how a forest looks after a wild fire.

  

 

 

 

 

We were amazed by them all!! The path was so difficult to cross, with the thorny twigs scratching our faces and our skins, getting caught in our hair and our clothes. The mountain became increasingly steep and rocky and thorny and slippery and hence, more and more interesting to walk.

           

      

      

We passed all our obstacles and finally reached the mountain top, and sat there, panting like Nala. We had forgotten to take a bottle of water. If only we too had a bucket of water to plunge into!

      

We took some rest up there, talked about the jungle life and wild fires and emergencies and bears and snakes for a while and finally as it was getting dark and cloudy, decided to climb down. We took a long shot of the projecting rock on the right opposite mountain peak, and started off.

     

Our return journey and the next day events in Yelagiri Part II

My Choice

DISCLAIMER: The contents of this post are not meant to be offensive and definitely to the general population. It is just another post with no double/triple meanings or inner implications or any other intentions, just plainly right from heart.

A lot of things that some of the NRIs I know been saying saying about me that has been pissing me off for quite some time. But something that a dumb pampered distant relative with rich parents and no idea of the actual meaning of life or reality said quite recently about me and my life and my choices kind of ticked me off a lot. It was like a spillover from a bowl that has been getting filled for quite some time now. The first thing that came up in my mind was:

House: "Spoken like a true circle queen."

Cameron looks at him funny.

House: "See, skinny, socially privileged white people get to draw this neat little circle. And everyone inside the circle is normal. Everyone outside the circle needs to be beaten, broken, and reset so they can be brought into the circle. Failing that, they should be institutionalized, or worse, pitied."

Cameron: "So it's wrong to feel sorry for this little boy?"

House: "Why would you feel sorry for someone who gets to opt out of the inane courteous formalities which are utterly meaningless, insincere, and therefore degrading? This kid doesn't have to pretend to be interested in your back pain or your excretions or your grandma's itchy place. Can you imagine how liberating it would be to live a life free of all the mind-numbing social niceties? I don't pity this kid. I envy him."

I am not comparing anyone here with anyone I am referring to, including myself. But what he says is almost always the absolute and unarguable fact, which people sometimes in real lives just refuse to accept because of their own circles.

So here is some clarification for the sake of all the above mentioned circle kings and queens.

This is for the people who keep wondering: Why are you not doing a foreign MS?
1. I have chosen not to do an MS simply coz I was, and still am not a fan of 'an-MS-in-US' concept, and I specifically wanted to get a few years of work-ex before an MBA.
2. I do not feel the pressing need to race the world in getting settled in some foreign land and get an NRI title, coz I am fully happy and satisfied in what I am here, what I have here, what I get here and who I am with here.
3. I chose not to study immediately after graduating with 2 degrees simply coz I was and I still am, sick of studying. I will probably just go and murder anyone who asks me to take a test or study some course at least for some time in the near future.
4. I joined a good company after passing out coz just like a lot of people, I too wanted self-earned-money, quality experience and an identity other than a college kid. I am extremely happy with what I have now and I DEFINITELY don’t envy or judge anyone who has taken along a different path of life.

This is for the people who just can't get over the question: Why are you working in a field that is not relevant to your degrees?
5. I took up a job in a field that may not appear too relevant to my degrees because, one of my degrees is useful only for research purposes, which I am not a fan of, and to be an expert in the other degree, I had to do an MS, and not what I wanted either.
6. The job I am in gives me most of what I want and a good percentage of what I need, and that is how much any human (not an Indian, any human) working anywhere would expect. Even a professional bungee jumper would have at least 10 things to brood and complain about his job!

I could go around asking people, about why you had chosen to get settled in US when you were born and brought up in India. No matter if you are studying or working there, you still are an Indian by birth. No matter how much you fake your accent or eat burgers for lunch or wipe your ass with a tissue, you would still not be accepted as an American there. But I certainly won't ask any of that coz its rude to intrude and I certainly won't judge you. I would respect the fact that you are educated, have brains and are old enough to think and set your priorities and choose what you feel is right for you.

Please note, I have NOT attempted GRE or any other exams even once, so I am NOT in a 'the-grapes-are-sour' state. I am simply not interested right now.

Also, I am NOT in any way against NRIs. In fact, I know a lot of sane and sensible NRIs whom I respect and admire a lot; so many relatives and friends. But I am a 100% against the those who sit around judging me for being me and not them!

I am also not against people's suggestions. They are all welcome. But just understand that the final decision is all mine. I shall go abroad when I wish to or when I choose to, and not just because some narrow minded people happened to have low opinions of me or insult my parents for my decisions. My parents have given me full freedom to decide my life and they give all the respect in the world to my choices and for that, I am extremely thankful to them.

And finally, there is only one thing I would like to say - Climb out of your holes, people!

And yet again

There was an incident that made my close friends think that I am an extremely sensitive girlie creature, which I most certainly am not. It was even mentioned in my write up while leaving the campus. The incident left me so embarrassed that I never went anywhere near doing it again, until today.

For people who have no idea what I am talking about, there is this sweet romantic movie 'If Only', which I happened to watch in my third year. My roommate was lying fast asleep on the other side of the bed, while I was happily watching it in mine, with my head phones on. The rest of my friends were all sitting in the next room gossipping away.

The movie was no suspense, highly predictable and I could guess where it was going and the ending too, within the first few minutes. I got so engrossed into the panic and desperation of the hero and his romantic ideas and his way of showing how much the his girl meant to him and everything, that by the end, I myself fell in love with him!

With his last monologue I was already in tears; and when she asked "Aren't you coming?" and he replied "Of course I am" knowing what was going to happen, and him covering and protecting her and actually dying for her.. I was weeping by then, uncontrollably!

I hardly realized that my roommate had woken up and was blinking groggily asking what had happened, and even my wingies in had come from the next room inquiring as to why I was crying. When they all saw that I was crying over a dead romantic hero, omg! They burst out laughing so loudly, that it broke my 15 minutes trans and brought me back into the real world.

All this while it has gotten screened a number of times in HBO, in Star Movies n all and I never even turned to that channel. I was that embarrassed! In fact, I have had it in my comp for quite sometime now. So I took a bet against myself, and decided to watch it and check out how mature and realistic I have become.

And to my greatest shock, the final scene this time, left me weeping only for 5 minutes rather then the 15 last time. Sigh! Apparently I am still quite unrealistic! But now, may be I can bet again next time, and end up not crying at all; Or may be never ever attempt watching it again!! :p

Physics

After the movie ‘Daybreakers’, I still wasn’t sleepy, though it was 12.30 in the night. So I started watching an episode of Bones, the one that started with a devil burning on the table in a church n all. The episode went on with the usual cool gross stuff and a psychiatric ward full of weirdoes. I wasn’t sleepy even after the episode, but decided to close the laptop nevertheless and tried to shut my eyes and brains. The AC was making such a noise and it was pretty cold already, so I switched it off and lay down in the dark silence, trying my best to go into my very own Pandora, when I heard a sound. It was a small hissing-squeaking sort of a noise. I got up to check if there was some insect in the room, but found nothing. So I switched the light off and rolled on into the bed, when the noise started again. It was growing bigger and was not continuous. I kind of got a little freaked, with my mind considering all sorts of possibilities from squeaky rats to snakes and switched on the lights to give a thorough inspection of the room, with the door open in case I needed to run out (;P), and yet I still found nothing.

I switched everything off again and cuddled back into my sheets, but the hissing sound kept bothering me. I decided to ignore it, filter it out and stop my bloody imagination from running miles. A few minutes later, it struck me. The darn sound was coming neither from some cricket nor from a rat. It was simply from the water bottle’s cap that was squeezed too tight, and was generating air bubbles at the cap rim. Damn you physics!! I simply got up again, opened the cap a little and the sound just vanished, and I finally drowned into deep deep sleep. :)

Anandi Dies?!?!?

WTF?? This is the girl who has till date, been portrayed as ‘the-innocent-Indian-village-kid-being-illtreated-in-the-name-of-culture’, is seen (in the trailer) to be running behind gangsters in Mumbai, in her shiny Rajasthani robes, and somewhere down the line, gets shot at and falls down dead. The subsequent clips also show her Photo framed with a lamp lit in front of it. Good God it was shocking!

If this twist in the story was even given as a headline in India Today as “Twist in Balika Vadhu”, then imagine the shockwave it must have created! Jobless that I am. I went ahead and Googled it to find that she has either bagged a huge movie offer or she has her annual exams in real life and might later on, come back from the dead. Well… Good for her either way!