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.

Destination Exasperation

OK, thanks to this nifty typing feature on the iPhone, I'm blogging on the move. There's a nice background soundtrack of 'Pyaar Se Pyaar Hum'(playing in my ears). In addition, some laptop-toting Papa is making his jumpy toddler listen to songs from SRK's movies. Which is infinitely better than trying to make the kid shut his mouth.

This one is arguably the boring-est of all the train journeys of my lifetime. It was doomed right from the beginning. One, I could have chosen to leave home a good two-and-a-half days later. God knows which notice from the IIT said we have to show them our ungainly faces on the 28th. I learn that I'm most probably the first non-Chennai-ite to have arrived in the city. Things back home were just beginning to warm-up : my pals had begun to come back from their respective colleges on and after the 19th which was the day their first semester exams ceased to exist. So, all we got was short of a week-which we tried to make the most of. However, as 'Yeh Dil Maange More', I'm still pretty cross.

To make it worse, as I was about to make myself comfortable in my compartment, I tried to size up the other people who were sharing it with me. They were all old farts. I pray for forgiveness, uparwaale, but this is how I felt. Buggers is even more apt. Unfortunately, one of them turned out to be an acquaintance of my father's. Babai was spot-on when he said, "Eibar ei lok ta toke puro chaatbe". He tried to strike up a totally pointless conversation with me. Pointless became annoying when his first question was, "So, you study English and Economics at IIT Madras. Is it better than engineering?" With the best deadpan expression I could manage, I retorted, "It will take me at least four-and-a-half years to answer your question". That made him shut up until bedtime, when he said he wanted the lower berth(MY BERTH) for his wife. You obviously think I readily gave up my berth, being the epitome of decency and politeness.

You are wrong. I was polite in my refusal, because I had stowed away my brand-new fifty grand laptop under that particular seat. But I gave them the middle berth, I did.

Uh...I don't feel like writing any more. This journey is much too painful and arses like these don't deserve any more importance...

My apologies...