For old times' sake

‘And this time, it's going to be brilliant’, were my thoughts when I disembarked from the train and was mighty chuffed to find everything so ‘in-sync’(for want of a better expression) – that car, that front seat, that stereo playing the same old CD, passing that Green-and-Yellow gate on GT road, that Kolkata Knight Riders’ Billboard(:o), etc.

And yet there was this voice at the back of my head which said, ‘Stop it – this rummy feeling isn’t going to last for long. Before you know it, it’s gonna be gone’. Understandably, I scoffed at even the slightest thought of the hols ending. Three months is a long, long time yaar. Now I have to go and vote as well, first thing in the morning. Will it be the Reds or will it be a Trinamool whitewash (err, greenwash)? Why am I thinking of all that bilge? And so I filed away that unsavoury thought somewhere far, where it wouldn’t be able to needle me.

It’s surprising how easily one can get back into that old way of doing things. It’s no point living in the past – I know someone who’d sneer and say these exact words. Well, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to live in the past. The past lives on… in you. And you don’t take a couple of days to ‘acclimatise’ to the change. You know how to deal with it. I trudge into the dining hall first thing in the morning, which has the TV no. 2 tuned to Times Now/NDTV 24x7/BBC World and that familiar genial man sitting in front of it, sipping his morning tea, and then downing whatever he can find in the fridge or in the loft. The lady in the kitchen reacts testily –‘Your cholesterol levels are going to get you!’, to which all he offers is a sheepish grin. A 13 year-old bloke emerges from the bathroom in a towel and yells – he’s getting late for school.

And I’m back there. In the afternoon at 2, I go to school to pick the brother up. Familiar faces smile and wave – the juniors, the teachers, the guards at the gate (Traffic duty, boss :D) and the usual question ‘Kemon aachish/Kemon aacho/How are you?’.

In the evening, I make a couple of phone calls, zip down to Polo Ground/Apcar Gardens/Burnpur Club/somebody’s house(whichever is convenient) and kickstart those adda sessions which seem neverending, until there’s a missed call from mum at, say, 10:30 pm at the earliest.

I come back home, shove dinner down my throat and then flounce off into the study. I switch on the PC, resume the inactive torrents and transfer the completed ones onto my laptop for viewing later on. Then I watch some TV, after which I switch on the AC in the bedroom and read whatever it is I’m reading at that point in time.

And then drift off to sleep until next morning, for which I can’t wait. That’s because I’m going to take out my two-wheeler at 5 am and go someplace with my bros. Or do something our group feels like doing, like having a gang over at our place to watch some movies or duel it out in Gran Turismo on the Playstation or indulge in the usual guy-talk (cars/sports/films/THAT girl).

These are my life’s little pleasures.

It’s been rightly said (here I go again, cockface) that people seem to get nostalgic about a lot of things they weren't so crazy about the first time around. How effing true is that!

That’s why I’m typing this out, while sipping Diet Coke, biting into the last pieces of that chocolate cake Mama made, and listening to ‘City of Blinding Lights’, which I feel is weirdly suited to the tone of the sentimental hogwash that you’re reading right now.

Strange Meeting

After a very long and arduous journey, I can finally sing, 'Main yahaan hoon, yahaan hoon yahaan hoon, yahaan'. With the kind of finality that comes only when one is a Kolkata Knight Riders' well-wisher. You know the team HAS to lose. There are no two ways about it. What’s more, the weather here was just perfect. The skies were cloudy, there were brisk winds all round and there was a light drizzle in the air. Pleasant-ness. Felt good. The car in the parking lot looked like it was my getaway vehicle from some crime scene. I realized I was thinking of nothing else at that instant. HOME. After a period of over three months.

There are a lot of reasons for my calling this post ‘Strange Meeting’, after the poem of the same name by Wilfred Owen(one of the best ever, according to me). Strangely, happy was the last word I was thinking of. I’d put most of that to the monumentally boring, slow, eventless and annoying journey that I had to face first up. A raucous trio of Biharis who just couldn't stop gushing about their laptops, their mobile phones, their choice of music and about how retarded their maternal uncle was, for he was travelling with his family, and had made the catastrophic error of choosing to travel in the general compartment - and was stingy about paying the TTE and getting a seat in the A/C compartment. Bleh. In the next compartment was a family which didn’t seem to have the faintest clue that making an unearthly racket all the time can be annoying to fellow passengers. God, that kid, Pranshu was his name - may all the bloodthirsty hordes from hell descend on him and silence him for good. Now I’m positive I hate children – especially those of the peskier variety. Like a great man said, “Parents, beat the muthafuckas!”

How do I feel? Hanging out with my homies – that bit sure feels awesome. But when I am at home or I am alone, I’m not so sure. I feel _____. My room still has those scary looking books – IIT Physics, JPNP; Fundamentals of Chemistry, Mathematics for IIT JEE – Tata McGraw Hill, Organic Chemistry - Morrison and Boyd… and so it goes on.

All I can do now is point and laugh at all that shit! I’ll let it out here too – Hahahhaha.

There, I already feel better. But the rest of it is so same, yet so different. Spending the evenings out of home, coming back to food – lots of it (if you have ever met my mother, you sure know what I am saying – why else do you think I have the impressive physique that men and women lust after?) and holding up a book in front of my face whilst lying on the couch with the A/C set to 16 degrees C. Feels OK, yet feels _____.

Starting up my ride by thumbing the red switch, it again feels _____. The instant I got my arse onto the rather stiff seat, I realised that my fingers on the handlebars also have that bizarre sensation. Now, I had the temerity of calling my ride a ‘ride’ – it is anything but. I hope it was the Yamaha FZ-15, I dream it was the Ducati 1098, but I know it is only a Bajaj Kristal (cue for cracking all the gay and effeminate jokes). It’s got DTSi. Even the Duke doesn’t have that!

Anyway, the brakes are wound up a lot tighter and the thing is pulling cleanly and effortlessly – a sure sign that it had gone for a service in the recent past. I made some errors while riding in front of the Rabindra Bhavan. Braked too early a couple of times and almost caused a collision with a Tata pick-up that thought the view of the Kristal’s arse was most certainly an automotive aphrodisiac. Yuck. _____.

The ideal word in those blank spaces has to be ‘weird’. Ah, that does it.

Oh ! Calcutta ...

Disclaimer : The use of the name of a reputed restaurant in the aforementioned city as the title of the post was purely situational, albeit intentional. Any offence to the restaurant owners is most regretted.


I'm back home. After what was probably the most taxing day of my life. Calcutta has sucked me dry in just 16 hours.

It started in the evening of Saturday, when I, accompanied by Papa rushed into the Asansol Railway terminus, hoping to get reservations in one of the AC coaches. As it usually happens with no-hopers like me, we failed to get a single seat in that coach.

So, we had to settle for the ordinary chair car.

That the Black Diamond Express ( Don't think it deserves to be called that ) did a record-rewriting feat...it reached Howrah at 2300 hrs! I swear.

As if reaching Howrah at 11 PM was not enough, Papa and I had to wait for 50 minutes in front of that effing pre-paid taxi booth! I was on the verge of killing the moronic clerk at the counter who was taking ages to issue the tickets, but, considering the fact that I had a very important examination coming up, I relented. Better sense prevailed.

So we were finally in the taxi after what seemed like an eternity. The night was reasonably cool, and I stuck my head out of the car's windows not unlike the poodles you see in rich people's cars. We drove past the Eden Gardens, which looks a hundred times more imposing against the night sky - boy, Calcutta is sure blessed to have an arena like that! The race-course was next, the magnificent SBI building and several other landmarks before we entered the locality of New Alipore, where we'd put up for the night...

If you thought we'd had enough drama for the day, you haven't been more wrong in your life! We couldn't find the house! The taxi driver didn't know that part of the city well, and we had to face another harrowing 30 minutes before we stumbled into House No. 744, totally deflated...After a quick shower and a late-night dinner, we crashed.

The next day would be another pot-boiler (literally), what with the mercury soaring all the time. And so it was. My exam was at 1000 hours, so we left the house at 0840, hailed a taxi and set off for the Ballygunge Army Camp, 'cause that was where my exam centre was allotted.

A huge gate with armed sentries greeted all the examinees once we were there...Parents were not allowed inside - only the examinees could proceed into the precincts of the camp. I bade my father good-bye and started what was going to be a long walk to the Army Public School.

As I had expected, it was an enormous campus. There are several 10-storeyed apartments for the servicemen which I walked past. There also seemed to be a hall where films were screened - there was an 'Aaja Nachle' poster outside it! There were a lot of trees all around, which were a welcome relief to these sore eyes of mine, which thus far had grotesque images of yellow Ambassadors and epileptic ( that's the word to describe them ) public buses seared into their retinas. I passed the Kendriya Vidyalaya on my way to the Army School, which I finally reached after a ten-minute walk. It was 0910 hrs at that time...there were another 30 minutes before we would be allowed inside the school. Till then I sat down on the pavement watching a game of slam-bang cricket being played by the locals on a field that was totally wet and slushy.

I will not bore you with the cumbersome details regarding the exam and how it was for me...I'll fast forward to 1300 hours when we left the camp in another yellow taxi (you get nothing else here) which soon swerved into a Tata Indica in its attempt to weave out of a tight spot. There was a plastic protector on the fender of the Indica (luckily for the owner) as a result of which there was not a single scratch on the Indica's side. The plastic protector was martyred in the process.

Next, there was a heated argument which saw the blame being passed on from one driver to the other after which it settled on the driver of our taxi - the Indica guy had scored a moral victory there - we hurtled along to New Alipore, and yes, this time we found the house right away.

We finally left Calcutta in a Volvo B7R bus which left from Esplanade at 1700 hrs. The bus, for some hitherto unknown reason, stopped for a long time at a stop (pun not intended) near the Eden Gardens. Looking around, one could see the pavements bustling with people going back home from work and, of course, the hawkers - How can I forget them? Every hawker had several Kolkata Knight Riders' faux tees and roughly the same number of customers. The light in the skies was dimming as the Eden's floodlights were beginning to warm up. The bus finally set off for Asansol after idling for 20 minutes. I'm still trying to figure out why the engine was kept running.

I settled down on 'the most ergonomically designed seat that has found its way into a bus plying in India' (Some CNBC show said this), reclined it a little, and started switching between the FM stations of Calcutta. Tripping on Bengali songs was fun. The efficient aircon made life even more comfortable.

The sky started to rumble after a while, and before anyone could blink, it was a full-on thunderstorm. The raindrops fell on the reinforced glass of the windows creating a staccato of muted thuds. The sky had gone all but black now and the flashes of lightning would light up the horizon from time to time. "There goes the IPL match at the Eden", I thought.

The rest of the journey was pretty much uneventful - there was a typical 80s blood and gore - heavy Hindi movie 'Gardish' that was being screened in the bus. It stars Jackie Shroff and XYZ maybe - I couldn't care less. I turned up the volume on my Motorola, and listened to several of my favourites.

So, we were back home at 2100 hrs, Sunday, the 18th of May.

A hurried meal. A cold shower. Falling face first on bed. Setting the AC to 16 degrees C.
Home isn't bad, really.