The week that wasn't

A chronological account of a few 'very interesting' days:

July 24th -
The time is 0001 hrs. I look forward to my Hyderabad trip and have an early morning flight to catch courtesy Go-Air. The trip is an official one as part of our induction process and there are around 50 of us making the trip from Mumbai to Hyderabad. Much to my dismay, I find out that I have been booked on IC (Indian Airlines) for the return leg. My dismay turns into anguish when I realise that I am amongst the 'fortunate few' who wasn't to get an opportunity to fly on Kingfisher during the round trip. One of my friends calls on me to rub it in at this late hour.

My dad is out of station and hence I place three alarms along the sides of my head and manage to wake up when the first rings. I am on top of the world when I leave my house and get abused by a taxi-driver when I attempt to wake him up. I sombre down and finally get a cab to reach the airport. My friends already start taunting me at this early hour and I rub salt into my own wound by complaining. My friends, X & Y, who incidentally are on Kingfisher are a big pain. Two stewards welcome me on board and there is no breakfast on offer- facts not missed by X & Y. If only they had been this alert every morning of their lives, they would have already gone a long way. I sleep well all my flight and make a naively unconvincing attempt to force upon the point that Go-Air is a better flight to travel on when you are looking for sleep.

My attire at this point of time is a mix of what a wacky Yankee and a hippie Indian would wear at night. I am in shorts which pass off as three-fourths as we reach the spanking hotel. I am led by the hostel staff to a place which I presume to be my room and much to my consternation, I find that I am in an auditorium with one of the heads of the organization I work for addressing us. I have half an urge to turn back and run for cover (literally), but I realise that most eyes are already fixed on this 'interesting guy' and sensibly, take a seat. I try to make my legs conspicuous by their absence and cover them with as many chairs as possible. People who know me well would concur with me when I say that there are more sightings of the blue moon than my getting angry, but at that point of time, I was seething. Being a GreenPeace activist, I feel compelled to attend the call of nature in between and slowly my inhibitions disappear and legs start to appear.

I don't think I have anticipated any moment in life as much as I did lunch that day for it gave me an opportunity to change. Kidding aside, it isn't a lot of fun turning up wearing beach attire at a plenary with the top executives of your organisation- which prides itself on etiquette- addressing you. I spend the rest of the day responding to various queries regarding my dressing sense. I feel like a celebrity addressing the media regarding a fashion faux-pas, the likes of which haven't been heard of since Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Superbowl a couple of years back.

I liberate myself at the late-night party though I still find myself justifying why a three-fourths extends only till your knee.



July 25th:
The time is 0001 hrs. Am pool-side when a foreigner comes up and pulls his weight around. "I guess the sun has gone down and it is not a great time to get a tan. Better off indoors", he tells me. I feel like boxing him on his ears but realise that am thoroughly outnumbered and take recourse to keeping calm. Retire to my room where my roommate tries to do his best impersonation of the Titanic 'hands on misty glass inside the car scene'. I wouldn't have minded it but the only problem is that he is inside the bathroom and makes some some weird sounds to boot.

I am woken up by the same sounds, the same window-panes and the same hands. Things are not helped when I realise that my mate seems to be deriving great pleasure out of his actions . I get an urge to check out quickly but still manage to reach my session late. As punishment, I am asked to do a duet with another sinner where I go down on my knees and feel thoroughly miffed. I don't leave the room during any of the breaks for fear of being late. A day for gayish pursuits indeed!

I start feeling more upbeat towards the end of the day and feel that my luck has changed for better. Take a good nap on the journey back to the airport. X & Y who are still my friends - and are on the IC flight- get themselves checked in and ask me to take a seat near theirs. Unsurprisingly, my request gets turned down and in keeping with times, I get a seat near the wash-room- an euphemism for a stinking toilet. I suspect that it is another prank on the part of X & Y.

Being hungry, I search for something to eat but I find the only thing costing less than a dollar to be pizza toppings. After much investigation, I buy a pizza at a cost that doesn't hurt my conscience much. I can't find a place to sit and my obsession for savouring the pizza lands me near X & Y, who are still my friends. And lo behold! I can only convey my sense of hunger after the pizza was devoured and leave the rest to the imagination of the reader, if at all there is one.

I sleep well again and get the shock of my life when I hear the pilot announce that we were 50 miles from Mumbai but were to keep circling for the next 90 minutes because of landing permissions. I am convinced that the plane would run out of fuel by then and rush down to the front just to confirm with my friends that what I had just heard wasn't just a figment of my imagination. My friends tell me that I wasn't dreaming but that is hardly relief and I go to sleep half-expecting not to wake up.

The flight lands thankfully at its destination but we are forced to wait another half an hour before descending from the plane and another 15 minutes before the bus arrives at the 'bus-stop'. The journey in the IC bus turns out to be marginally better than a ride on BEST and everybody is so mentally exhausted that nobody bothers taunting me again. I reach home uneventfully and say Amen!

Trust or Mistrust!

A presumptive look at tomorrow's morning newspapers:

Initial Impressions!

A week that started on a rotten note ended with me " putting my feet up" as Ricky Ponting would put it. Though it has been a couple of weeks with my first employers, my weeks still run from Monday to Sunday (for the uninitiated, weeks in office run from.....Oops! I forgot what they told me during my induction. Good riddance!).

Roger lost; India lost and worst of all, I had to wake up at 7 in the morning after spending a weekend with customary rainy-season blues. Though Indian cricket has ceased to captivate me ever since the Dravid-Chappell era, my jingoism and misplaced sense of national duty make me want India to win every time they play. But I would still take an Indian defeat for a Federer slam! How can somebody not like Roger? His equanimity, confidence, humility and class have meant that my support for him has always been unequivocal. Besides, I have always found Nadal's physique repulsive and obnoxious.

Getting sacked by your first firm within two weeks of joining wouldn't necessarily constitute a "peak in your career" and being a firm believer in journalistic propriety, I shall stay away from that. So what about India's greatest paradox, Mumbai? The standard organizational answer for that seems to be the "place where the slum-dwellers and the millionaire co-exist". I have found Mumbai to be a pathetic city to be honest with deplorable representation in the IPL. I am still to comprehend the fascination for this city that seems to be omnipresent amongst creed of our kind. I bet that there would be no other city in the world where you would require a train, a two-wheeler, a four-wheeler and a boat to really feel comfortable about moving around.

It is a city with messy traffic jams; gargantuan property valuations and uncomfortable pollution levels so much so that I reckon it won't be long before slums start constituting a reasonable bedroom, hall and kitchen integrated 1 BHK. The positives would be the pubs, the malls and of course the ubiquitous opposite sex. I wonder if girls have a similar priority list too! The only thing that has really elicited a chuckle out of me would have to be the cops. All cops look eerily similar; have greying moustaches the length of which would have given Veerappan a run for his money; have those big tummies with a book in hand and an Enfield for support and keep chewing something or the other. They would indeed make good brand ambassadors for the pan/ghutka firms though I may be naive in assuming that they have not yet shifted to friendlier confectioneries.

All these inconvenient truths about Mumbai reminded me about the 'trinity of books' that V.S. Naipaul -guess I have to call him Sir but again I am in an organisation which is extremely flat and discourages such practices; just to prove I wasn't sleeping all along during my induction- wrote about India which I unsuccessfully tried to complete during my vacations. The innate pessimism and inherent negativity about India made me give up finally. Vidya Naipaul might have praised by the sycophantic Indian media for the positive specks that he might have thrown out but I find it hard to reason why we seem to be ever so keen to embrace him as Indian. I consider him to be as much of an Indian as I consider Shobaa De to stand for the whole of humanity. Her penchant for female chauvinism would come a close second to the Left's China posturing as far as cliches go in Indian society.

Talking of which, I am really starting to get worried about the high rates of inflation and the economic recession for the first time in my life. I have got a pay coming up and have got a decent list of necessities, comforts and luxuries to procure. Most of my friends have already felt the pinch after a couple of dinners with their girlfriends - one of my luxuries by the way- and have already started anticipating their next pay. Some of my friends are also in the pursuit of trying to figure out which job would suit them best and are in the process of shifting already. Choosing the best place to work has all of of a sudden become as complex as solving Schrodinger's wave equation or understanding with certainty, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. You can carefully examine all options at hand and get confused; you can pick one out of those at random and still get confused after you start working or you can pick the one that pays you most and still get confused about the intricacies of the pay package. Maybe one of those IITians working should think of doing some research on how to solve this conundrum and come up with a mathematical equation . The very words 'higher studies' should only serve to add to his confusion.

Thus passes an uneventful life! Got to sleep now or I might well end up emptying the coffee-vending machine at office in my attempts to stay awake.