aditya kumar's weblog

I arrived here in the evening on a train that runs on meter gauge track. It takes almost 8 hours from Indore to reach here. The official time table indicates a little more than 6 hours, but I do not care since my train to Goa arrives past midnight. Whether this train pulls in at 5 PM or at 6:30 PM, I am hardly bothered since I have a lot of time to kill anyway.

I have travelled enough in this long, wide country to conclude that travelling by train in India is an important part of your syllabus if you think of India as a “full term course”. All the theory learned like “The diversity of the land”, “the different dialects in the speech” come to life when you travel in the train, second class. But meter gauge track is different. It’s like specialising in “small town India” and the villages. The usual trains pass by them with speeds of 110 km per hour as if flipping pages of the book and skipping small, not so important chapters. At the small railway platforms of these very same villages, the meter gauge track trains spend hours.

So we start our journey from Indore and pass on, the two of us, my friend $D and me, passing by stations like Mhow, where we have a stop of 45 minutes. A man sells Kachoris in a cardboard box. It is a long journey and food could be a problem so we eat what we get. By early afternoon we reach Kalakand. Everytime that I have passed through this station, I am reminded of the sweet. I am told the village name is Kalakand because it is famous for the sweet with the same name.

Lucky Ali sings “kitni haseen zindagi” in my ears.

The train stops at the slightest excuse it finds. We do not get annoyed, all this was expected. But we observe. We see villagers carrying huge loads of vegetables in the train. One corner of the coach smells of coriander. On the outside of the windows, hooks are attached, one by one. Some of these hooks carry small logs of wood while the rest carry big cans of milk.

We reach Khandwa at 6:15 PM. According to the timetable we should have been here an hour back.

$D’s train is a good 3 hours late so I have company before I catch the train that will take me to Goa at midnight. Our first stop is the railway canteen run by a bespectacled man who seems well educated and a nice person. Dressed in a simple, clean full sleeve shirt and a little stocky. We order tea and in addition, I order bread and omelette. After a journey like this, where there are no big stations and no food stalls, this is a treat. The man behind the counter continues to read his newspaper while his son, probably 10 years old, tries to engage him in conversations. His trials go in vain.

$D is bored. Unlike me, he does not carry a Walkman. Amidst of all the trains that come and go in front of us, he picks out Bangalore-Delhi Karnataka Express and goes in to roam inside the train while it stands on the platform. “The girls are beautiful inside”, he arrives at the conclusion after he comes back with a wide grin. Evidently, the Bangalore-Delhi culture is in full form inside the coaches. That is the only glimpse we see of the metro culture in one of the busiest rail junctions of Central India. I see $D enjoyed his short lived adventure.

The much sought after train to Bhagalpur arrives. $D finally leaves at around 9 PM. This main part of his journey shall take a good 36 hours more. He has a waiting list ticket. That means no guarantee of a seat. I do not have a confirmed seat for the journey either but Deepavali is around the corner and we are going to our homes to celebrate. Nothing else matters to us. Homecoming could not get better than this. That is the biggest joy.

I stay there, on the platform, sitting on a bench while listening to Six Pence None the Richer’s “Kiss me”. I just heard, my train is on time, a quarter past midnight. This train coming from Delhi and going to Ernakulam in Kerala, will go through the Konkan route and drop me home, Madgaon, in the next 24 hours.

The year was 1999. In the next two years that I went home from Indore via Khandwa, things did not change much. The meter gauge train to Khandwa continued to stop at the slightest excuse and continued carrying logs of woods stuck outside the window. The man behind the counter at Khandwa Station’s canteen continued to indulge himself with late evening newspaper reading while I always ordered my favorite Bread and omelette with tea. I looked at him and wondered if he ever recognised me. Don’t know why, but I hoped for that. But I do not think he ever did. And whenever he noticed me for those 3-5 seconds, each time, it appeared as a mere interruption in his evening newspaper reading project.

$D told me, nothing much has changed there, even now.

Things don’t change much in small town India.

First is the FooBar2000 Audio player. foo and bar, as my friends from the computer science field will recognise, are two variables that are used extensively in syntax examples of the subject. But this is an Mp3 playing software that does its job nicely. It has no “jazz”, no skins, no “feel-good” look but it is probably the best Mp3 player that I have come across in terms of performance, memory usage (All it takes is a little more than 2MB of RAM– Compare that to 12 MB taken by Winamp and almost 30 MB consumed by iTunes!). It is highly configurable, and very flexible. You can download it here. And yes, highly recommended for techies. We all realise how much precious RAM is!

It will take time to get used to it but this is something that seems so simple yet packs quite a punch.

Second thing that has worked great for me is Coldplay’s X&Y album. Good music to the core. Chris Martin and the gang has come of age! With the burden of expectations on Coldplay, X&Y is genius work.

If you are into music of the U2, REM, Oasis kinds, I suggest you listen to this.

This album grows on you. It will take time to get used to it but this is something that seems so simple yet packs quite a punch.

[above: Foobar2000 playing ColdPlay’s X&Y]

Update:

Thanks to Google Earth and the satellite up above, I was literally able to locate my home, the one I spent my childhood in. This was off-shore Bombay and a place so serene that you have to be a part of it to imagine it. I stayed here for 6 years and at the end of it I had travelled more on sea than land.

And of course, below is the magnificent Bombay. Seen from 22000 feet above.

From the Truman Archives.

This post, was originally written on Sunday, the 23rd of January 2005. It has nothing much to offer but an account of my almost ninety minutes stay at a cafe, during which I almost completed a really wonderful book, while keeping a keen eye on the surroundings. Some of the readers might have gone through it before since I had circulated this on email.

Sunday was good to spend. I was about 100 pages away to end Amitav Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide” and thought it would be nothing better to read the ending pages over a coffee. So I went to MG Road and there Barista has an open air cafe.

I have developed this habit of stopping by at every bookstore that I see. Be it a street vendor or a big bookshop I visit it, if it’s on my way and if time permits. If I have a book in my hand, the bookstore owner always(well, almost) requests me to let him have a look at it. While he looks at it, his face expression changes to give the impression that he is an expert in literature, a scholar who spends more time reading than anything else. While he flips the pages of the book, it seems he is understanding every word that flew by, every page flipped achieved something for him that previously he could not. And maybe it really did. Trying to keep himself updated about the business he is in. Trying to be with the times I guess. Nothing wrong in that. In fact, Its amusing that street vendors who, it seems, don’t even know English, talk to me, sometimes in broken words, ask about how the book is. They listen with keen interest and try to memorise the name of the author (If it is an author they are not aware of) and sometimes they come up to me, pointing to the book I hold. It’s a brilliant book, I am told. Has it been read by you, I ask, wondering about the authenticity of his last statement. The answer is (surprisingly) affirmative, to some extent. Read in parts only, so as to suggest the reader something. Typical book store owners mentality. And a good one at that by the way.

There are less better things in life than reading a book in the warm afternoon winter sunshine with the breeze blowing with your hand holding a cuppa latte. On the table next to mine, a girl with 4 guys, cribbing about life while smoking a cigarette. I do not know, but there was something strange about it.

A couple on the right, who seemed to be meeting each other for the first time. “I believe I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky”, quoted the guy, from the song by R.Kelly, loud enough to be heard across the table. Pretty strong words on your first day out, I guess. Let the lady judge you lad.

Then another girl holding a red rose, waiting for someone. I could see that in the brief moment when I took the liberty of looking in her eyes, which were quite oblivious to surroundings, expecting that known face any moment from the evercoming and never ending tide of people on the sidewalk. Biting her lips, cursing inside maybe, that men are always late.

Enough for a day I thought. And the book was coming to an end anyway. As the writer rightly puts,

“Words. What are they afterall. Like a wind blowing ripples on the water surface. The real river flows beneath. Unheard of, Unseen. With a story never told.”

Now, I don’t normally do this but sometimes we all do some things without any reason.

Some songs have it in them to take you to another era, some other time of your life. Apparently, the song I am talking about also happens to be the only song that I have ever volunteered to dance on.

This song is originally by Ryan Adams, performed by The Corrs and Bono- the result is the best duet I have ever experienced. So allow me to present some words from this beautiful song.

Many writers and travellers have been left amused and enough literature and travelogues have been written on the city of Bombay that I wonder if I would be able to do justice while I attempt to tell you my experiences when I visited the city recently. I was not a tourist. This is home away from home.

On 23 July 2005, 3 days before the Bombay cloudburst, the city was as sunny and sweaty as it could be. I guess the pictures suggest that.


[Above: The Flora Fountain]

Nostalgic crossroads, these on the Flora Fountain. It was 15 years ago, I used to have ice-cream cones, at least a couple of them- A bribe my mother paid me to keep quiet while she took her time shopping and bargaining with the cloth merchants. And I was always fascinated by the glass entrance of the Vimal Showroom that slid open as I walked towards it. But in 1990, this could happen only in Bombay. I also wondered what “Akbarallys” exactly sold. At one end of the Flora Fountain, towards Churchgate was the street of pavement booksellers. All the books you can imagine, and you did not have to be a rich man to buy them in bulk. Towards the other end, starting from the VSNL building, was the most boring place on the planet, or so I thought, the Fashion Street- 2 Kms of clothes, clothes and clothes.

What good would that do to a 10 year old? There were no book shops there; that meant no comics. It was often that I said to ma, “amma, when you want to go to Fashion street, count me out of it”.


[Above: The Old Taj Hotel]


[Above: The Friends of the Gateway]

The Gateway of India, as always drenched in the salty, smelly breeze. The colourful boats, still the same much like faithful companions to the age old monument. Not even the colour schemes have changed and the odd rubber tyres all over them. As I stand facing the green sea with the Gateway behind my back, I see the inland, the large chunk of land devoid of the mainland, which had once been my home for 6 years. The hill, far away and in the middle of the sea, with a tower on top. The view so faint that the hill almost dissolved itself into the surroundings of the sea and the sky, just a thin borderline preventing that from happening. Happy Homecoming.


[Above: The Kitten at Bombay VT]

On a personal note, I thought a post here should be a fitting tribute to my good old (heehee..**devil grin**..good, OLD) Blogger Friend, EP.

Happy Birthday EP. Keep sprinkling humor on your everyday experiences while you blog.

EP once featured in Rediffblogs “Top Blogs” and thats how I came to know him. I dont know about others but I go through his archives and read stuff to lighten my mood many times. Here is one…
and this one, which was when his blog made it to the Best of Rediffblogs.

Rock on, EP.