ATLANTA.. a journey to remember

Hi All,

I ve reached and survived for two whole days in the land of martin luther king! And it has been one wild ride!

Its been an adventure and a misadventure on many counts..

First i guess most would know that my first ever international flight was canceled due to a strike in an airport in Germany! We had to wait for over four hours till the lufthansa staff could rebook us thru jet airways and delta airline.. Then we merrily headed home to sleep another night on our home soil... it took the fright and the excitement away from the entire process of going abroad or so i thought.. as the taxi took me back home via the usual route.. Soaked up every place in chennai..Felt the weird attachment born which binds u to ur city when u realize u are leaving it for an alien land.

Next day eve. I was back at the airport...and went up to the jet airways check in counter to get my boarding pass.. Another dirty little twist in the plot designed by cruel mother fate surfaces! My ticket from Chennai to Brussels has been canceled.. but my flight from brussels to Atlanta has been confirmed.. What a comedy!

The flight was scheduled to depart at 00:10 and i was waiting till 11 :40 to know whether i would be boarding the flight due to kevalamana misorganization by lufthansa officials.. psst note: LUFTHANSA is a stupid stupid flight.. Dont ever board one.. probably they will tell u that they have run out of fuel midway and ask u to jump using a parachute... and u will end up jumping and realising they have given u a knapsack which they had accidentally placed instead of the parachute due to economical constraints... :)

And finally i managed to get into jet..It was awesome...the entertainment system and the service were really good.. Then came brussels.. We were frisked and made to wait in the transit area where the only stuff which didn't require any euros was using the restroom! :) so we exploited that service. Then we waited till Delta airlines which was supposed to fly us to Atlanta ripped us off.. Yet another royal bilking! We had to pay 200$ for the extra third piece we were carrying which was not to be a problem if we had travelled by Lufthansa.. Lufthansa officials promised us it wouldn't be a problem! Lesson learnt: No one is ur friend.. they were being polite to get rid of us earlier. The world doesn't conspire to help u without a profit motive! :)

So we paid the 200 bucks and got on the delta flight which was about as cheap as they come.. compared to jet airways Delta was a joke! Jai Hind...

We landed at Atlanta at around 13:40. We went through immigration and customs and finally collected our check in baggage at a building nearby to which we commuted by a subway train.. hmmph talk abt flaunting technology to prove that they are superior to us..! ;) Grow up Americans. We had people from the India Club who had come to receive us. We had like 14 pieces of luggage sheaperded by four people! :) We managed to get to our residence by squeezing in as much of luggage and four people in a car and the remaining made its way thru the local public transit system named MARTA. As if things were going outta the way to make things difficult. The guy who was supposed to let us into the place was out.. he had left the key under the carpet.. an ingenius hiding place totally remarkable!! We four roommates were all alone for the first fseven hours after we landed in the USA. :) We had no clue what to do. No idea of the area we were supposed to be in. It was a shady place populated by african americans who were big and intimidating. We finally mustered up enough courage to venture out and try to locate a store where we could get something to eat... We finally located a grocery store called Lucki! Outside were three guys in typical hip hop style... We decided to give the place a wide berth when suddenly one of them called out HEYYYY!.. I turned outta reflex and stuck somewhere between being courteous and wary stared dumbly.. my friend vishnu on the other hand appeared all cool and normal and adviced me not to turn at every call i heard and that it was probably not meant for me.. but as we walked past we heard the calls getting louder.. and vishnu realized he was mistaken to my despair! they were directing the calls at us! we tried to half run .. half walk our way outta the place.. scared outta our wits.. :)

We entered a burger store run by two chinese.. no.. korean .. ok i dont know.. asian people! we got four burgers and a coke bottle and made our way back to our place.. sat on the porch and had a quiet dinner.. A lady walking up the pavement stopped outside our door. and gaped at the four of us.. she silently made her way past us into the house... She was a spanish lady who was occupying one of the upper bedrooms!.. she came down and inquired about who the hell we were. She was informed of our arrival earlier it seems.. yet its not often that u come back home to find four starved scared indians sitting on ur porch.. She was polite and went back to her room. We occupied the couches in the living room where we had and still have dumped our luggage! We didnt meet anyone till past ten.. when finally one guy staying in the basement room made an appearance and left just as soon.. Then after arnd ten min he reappeared with another person. They were both indians. and lived next door. One of them was Vishnu's cousin. They were shocked at our predicament. They had no idea of our arrival nor did they know that we had no one to take care of us.. They were really nice and helped us out.. Got us set up with the place.. Next day morning they came and gave a general idea abt the place... we chit chatted. Then one of them we had met the night before ,Santosh, took us shopping at walmart to help us get the basic stuff such as asleeping bags... pillows.. laundry bags.. toilet paper..et all.. and the groceries at kroger. He then treated us to semi lunch/ dinner at a mexican place called willy's . WE had one of the best possible burritos.. and a bottomless coke! :) Sated we returned and chatted about japanese anime and akira kurosawa's films and tennis and US stuff till night when we finally hit the sack..

Today caught a movie. and cooked.. more in detail abt it later! :)


Cheers
Ashwin

Poor Punctual Palaniswamy...

Part of the same Era...

Well.. continuing from where i left off...
I am stuck in nostalgia. I can remember vividly my first day in college. Where my parents wanted to find me the most genteel, naive and religious roommates possible. To my horror initially i thought they succeeded in finding three such people who were gonna share my room. To theirs, they learnt four years later that they couldn't have been more wrong! And well i could never have been more happier with their flawed sense of character judgement! :) Especially Sai( the stud in our room) and I share a unique trait, a guilt free conscience when it comes to avoiding all academic activities! We bunked an afternoon one week into coll because we were too tired to go down the stairs and walk from hostel to the college. We spent the entire afternoon listening to a washed, jaded summer of 69 by B Adams and sleeping off somewhere in the middle.. Thus began our exciting adventurous life!

Four years has seen me grow from a boy into a man..(he hee..i always wanted to use this sentence.. all good farewell speeches and youth stories have this.. Its corny.. cheesy and cliched.. .hmm..true too if u can look beyond all that). Hostel life was the best thing to have happened to a lazy bum such as me(It made me more lazy.. in case u were thinking i had changed). Responsibility, independence, adaptability.. all the other good stuff that u can write on ur statement of purpose :) happened. It taught me maturity. Pleasee trust me! Its true...It did.. it did.. I am a more mature kid now.. i no longer think girls are aliens! ;) oops.. may be not so mature enough to avoid saying that in public.. :)

Its a miracle how many things u learn in coll. Another miracle how it never relates to acads... By the end of my first semester, we had learned to treat unit tests and periodicals as important as ear wax, find all the hang out spots, bunk with precision to avoid the most torturous classes, utilize the local transportation facilities with max efficiency, watch two movies consecutively with an headache in a rundown decrepit theatre and find innovative ways to avoid work.

Its an ERA!

Yup.. I've decided to write about the end of an era.. by the way i am writing this off the cuff.. so i may meander off from what i am trying to say in the middle. This post is gonna be full of stray thoughts, random musings, incoherent scenes, with no central theme and no prissy grammar.

To begin with... to people who think the word era has been misused here... let me quote directly from the sitcom 'Friends' - An era is a significant period of time. Period. Go to hell!:) and i can find no other four years of my life more significant than the ones i spent in undergrad.. life altering and transformative! oh oh.. by the way i am an engineer now ;). coming back to the topic.

Memories are fun. Its a way of reliving your past. And after four years, I know I have enough memories to cherish and live life fully. I am not a pious person. My school of thought deviates from the norm. It goes against two conventional ideas for mortal well being..
1)Its doesn't do well to dwell on memories and 2)Man must rid himself of attachment!

Memories remind us there were times in our lives when we have hit rock bottom.. but we are still standing. It tells us we have overcome our worst times. Gives us hope to face tough situations in the future with or without the experiences gained from the past. Happy memories remind us that we have lived life to the fullest. we know what it means to be in a state of bliss and feel on top of the world and that we can expect such good moments again in our life. Memories give us hope and hope to me is more important than any other thing in my life!
I am attached to everything.. be it my first cycle, my camera, my childhood toy, my fav movie, my first book... And i dont think its silly! I did get attached to my rooms in college. I still miss the coll and classes life. I am attached to my roommates... and in my case I am fortunate that i gained in them some of the best friends for life. My justification for attachment is simple. The following story should illustrate it. I watched a jackie chan movie recently where Jackie plays an immortal guy who befriends a boy. Jackie is wounded in battle when he gives this speech. It goes something like this...

The boy says "Hold on...You cant die."
Jackie -"No i can die. " The boy surprised, says "Its not possible you said you were immortal!".
Jackie -" I am immortal. I am not the monk who says 'Free yourselves from earthly possessions. Be devoid of attachments. Seek isolation. Live a life of solitude and you can gain peace and longevity.' cause though such a man can actually live for eternity, can u consider such a man to have actually lived?? Does such a life actually give satisfaction? I prefer to drink wine, dance, make friends, travel, laugh till my stomach aches, eat till my stomach is full and sleep on a comfortable couch. I prefer loving a woman and attaching myself to a person. Living for them,living through them. That in my view is a life well lived. . I am immortal as i live in your memory. This is possible only through attachments. If you are attached to something u leave a trace of u behind in it. This makes u immortal." ..Yeah profound eh! seriously back in the theatre i would have preferred jackie's kicking the bad guy's ass with some cool spewing snake necking giraffe move!:)

In summation, two punch dialogues... 1) If nostalgia is a disease, i am glad i am a sick man.
2) Mortality is more immortal than immortality. :) ah ha!

Nosebleed

Running past green shrubbery, it hoots its horn. The sound seems so distant. It is almost hard to believe that I am a part of the entity that makes this long low distant hum. Horizontal bars dotted with rust hinder my otherwise panoramic view of a lazy dull green field with palm trees in the background. As it gathers a sudden spurt of speed, the foliage and the ground appear to blur and shoot past me. A lone brown track with cross bars joins our journey out of nowhere. It seems dedicated and stubborn, refusing to let us go out of sight.

On my left, an eight year old boy lolls around restless. He tries sitting still but his hormones won’t let him. He gazes past me to notice the sudden appearance of a few stray houses next to the determined track. It holds his interest for a while, but providing no content for his vivid and active imagination relinquishes hold of his gaze and his mind. He then picks up a scrap of old newspaper lying next to a sixty plus something old man sitting to his left, rolls it up and peers out the window through one end of the rolled up sheaf of newspaper placed on one of the bars. He is happy; he has made a telescope or something similar that his mind conjured up. The old man sips his coffee, okay, a coffee variant with a lot of water and a little milk added to a pinch of adulterated coffee powder. This is coffee here.

A man opposite to me flips through a magazine he has bought for the journey, pausing at a page long enough for me to confirm my suspicions of it containing a picture of a scantily clad member of the opposite sex and a little article, totally irrelevant, accompanying it.

A loud voice reaches my ears. A guy strolls down the cluttered aisle trying to sell his wares. He carries on a practiced monologue convincing a few passengers to buy in the process. He reaches my compartment and shouts “Nursery Rhymes, Toys!!” He rotates a weird thing that makes a squeaky sound. The kid next to me looks up excitedly. The different colors and the man’s gracious attitude allure him. He flinches involuntarily; half rises and provides an expectant and imploring look at his mom. A glare from her shatters his hopes and another, silences his mouth which was opening up for a quick wail. He sits down hard, scowling. The man selling the toys realizing the failure of his enticement tactics sighs and continues past our niche.

* * *

It rumbles past fast. Parched ground and brown hills come into view. Goats and a few huts find a place in this scene. A little temple with bright alternating red and white stripes appears and stays for a time brief before we whiz by it.

I feel a tug on my arm. I look down to see the kid’s hand on mine. I raise my head a little and look into his face. He holds my gaze for a few seconds before asking in a small voice

“Anna, what happened to your nose?”

I open my mouth to reply but a thunderous rumble startles me. I turn around and see a rust colored goods train rushing past us through the window. I subconsciously start counting the carriages. When the last coach disappeared from my sight, I turn back to face the kid.

“37” he says.

I blink for a moment. “36” I say. He seems to accept it. I was no great shakes in mathematics and in all possibility I was more likely the one who was wrong but my ego wouldn’t allow me to admit that. Instead I nod to him reassuringly as if to encourage him to get it right the next time.

He repeats his earlier question “Your nose is red. What happened?”

I answer “It’s a long story.”

He continues to stare inquisitively awaiting a more detailed report on the matter.

I ask him “You coming from Coimbatore?”

“Yes anna, I came to visit my thatha. He is sick. ” He points to the old man on his left.

His mom looks up from her book to scrutinize me, curious as to whom her son was sharing this apparently semi classified information with. My innocuous countenance and seemingly innocent exterior puts her suspicions to rest and she returns to her book.

“Well, I got a nosebleed” I tell him.

“Oh. How come na? Did you fall?” he asks.

A smile plays into my lips.

“No, it is due to a small fight.”

“Oh.”

He stays quiet for a while, then turns around to face me and asks “How did it happen?”

Well I realize that I have no other option but to tell him the story.

I stare at the opposite seat not seeing anything for a few moments, recollecting my thoughts, recalling the events that morning prior to my boarding the train.

“My house is in Madras. I am going home today.” I begin abruptly. Not a lot of sense in these words but I was just getting started.

The kid nods his head expecting more.

I continue “Well I had packed my bags and was ready to leave for the station from my hostel. I was walking to the bus stop when I saw a lady speaking on a cell phone. Holding her hand is a little girl about your age.”

“She was dribbling a bright green tennis ball. On one occasion it bounced high and she missed it. The ball dashed across the road and the girl ran fast to catch it. From the opposite side I saw a huge bus hurtling down the road. The girl didn’t see it. She reaches for the ball which had rolled to a stop. Her mom saw the scene and realized the gravity of the situation only when she had just hung up the call and was looking around for her kid. It was obvious that the bus would reach the girl before she could. I was closer to the girl. The bus was hardly two meters away and not stopping. I pounced on the kid. Grabbed her from behind and rolled down the road. Bam!! ” I pause.

He jumps up excitedly shouting “What happened? What happened then??.”

I smile. He pants “You saved her? She is all right la? You hit the ground and got the nose bleed right?” he asks inquiringly.

I remain quiet. After a moment, “Yes, I saved her but no I didn’t get hurt. I didn’t get the nosebleed that way. I just rolled away smoothly, the bus missing us by inches.” I depict the narrow margin of escape with my hands.

“But nothing hit us. I just got dirty.” I point to my shirt.

His face lights up in relief. He looks at the dirty creases across my light blue shirt and cracks into a smile, reconstructing the sequence of events in his mind.

After an entire minute of silence he asks again “So then… Nosebleed eppadi?”

“Well my bus arrived and I managed to crash through the crowd and found a spot to stand inside.” I continue.

He sits down again and listens to me with rapt attention.

“The bus makes its slow tortuous way winding through the ‘hardly there’ roads. Finally it reached the RS stop. I got down with much difficulty having to shout out and push my way past at least ten men between me and the exit. I walked into the station.I stopped to look at the board that charts the arrival and departure timings. My immediate destination was platform three. I walk down the ramp and head to platform three through the passage that leads to it. A recent arrival at platform four led to a strong crowd moving in the opposite direction. I struggled to make my way past the people who were scampering out like a pack of rats. Pushing relentlessly and inching forward slowly I reach my target. I found that my train hadn’t arrived yet.”

I could see I was boring the kid and decide to narrate faster. I feel a sudden hot tingling sensation on my neck. I turn around to catch the setting rays of the sun direct. It clouds my vision for a moment. I squint through the brightness. A few seconds elapse and I get back my compromised vision. I see everything in a yellow hue. We had changed direction somewhere and I realize we were slowing down now. The lone track isn’t alone anymore. It joins its friends and entwines with them gladly to create a crisscross pattern of shining brown lines. A raised platform with a huge yellow board appears spelling out the station’s name.

“Coffee, Coffee, hot coffee!”

“Chai, masala chaaaaiiiii!”

Caffeine cries ring through the air. The kid tugs my arm again. I look down at him “One minute.”

I call out to a guy selling coffee. He darts quickly to my window and passes me a hot cup through the bars. I collect the cup and place it on the window sill, pass a ten rupee note to him, get back the change and resume my story.

“Well where was I? Oh yeah… the platform. I was standing at the platform, looking at the empty tracks. I got a magazine from a nearby book stall and a water bottle. There was a resounding low whistle. Our train was moving slowly into the station. A massive crowd had gathered to fight entry into the unreserved compartment. People were jostling each other in the mad hurry to find a place to sit.”

As I was making my way through the ‘orderly’ crowd, I felt someone reach into my pant pocket and it wasn’t for ‘fun’! I whirled around to find a dark, burly guy desperately trying to be adroit and extract my wallet without disturbing me from my work. He was so involved he didn’t even notice that I had stopped and was actually gaping at his antics for a few seconds now.” I stop.

“What?? What happened then?” The kid asks exuding impatience.

“It was only when I caught his hand and shouted for help that he realized that he had failed this mission, poor fellow. Bidding for a miraculous escape he pushed me against the book stall hard and started running. I lost my balance and fell, twisting in the last minute out of reflex to break my fall. I succeeded in breaking the fall but I hit my face against the edge of the wooden stand. I could feel something warm running down my nose.”

“It broke your nose!” the kid cries out ecstatically. I hope the reason for his glee is due to the fact that he finally found the answer to his rather simple question posed hours earlier. I nod amused and continue.

“I was kind of mad by now and gave chase. People were looking at us in a bemused way. I caught up with him. Grabbed his collar from behind and aimed a kick behind his knees. He buckled and went rolling. I pounced on him and held him down. By this time people realized what was happening and two police men who had appeared from amidst the crowd apprehended him. Well I checked my wallet to see if it was still safe and boarded the train. Now here I am telling you this.”

I conclude.

The kid, full of zeal, looks at me in amazement. Well this is the sort of stuff he reads in tinkle. “Super anna! You are great. Wish I could have hit him too.”

Well I guess an eight year old boy can’t be sarcastic. I was thankful that my humble façade, a lean wimpy physique with a small paunch in the offing didn’t detract the credibility of the story and deter his opinion about the narrated events!

The kid wakes his sleeping granddad and starts narrating the story to the dazed old man. A grin creeps into my face and I turn around to look out the window. It is almost dark outside. Well I had passed nearly two hours of this tedious journey entertaining an eight year old with the events of the day.

Somehow I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was suffering from a severe cold and that just before I started from my hostel I had blown my nose too hard, ruptured a stray vessel and bled profusely or that I had tripped on a questionable packet and fallen down trying to catch the bus which was leaving the bus stop or that an intelligent thief with nimble hands had relieved me of my empty purse when I had gaily boarded the train.

Well after all he is an eight year old kid. He doesn’t need a reality check that will stunt his imagination.

He has all the time in the world to learn that life in its own inexorable way will make you fall flat on your face, proceed to kick you when you are down before picking you up and elevating you to greater heights.

Once again I feel that small tug on my arm… I turn around and look into the black excited eyes of the kid, see little distorted images of my face in his pupils. He looks at me with awe. He stretches his hands wide and asks “Was he this big anna?”

I grin and nod at him, my eyes twinkling. Its dark outside and there is a booming whistle in the distance.