Wonderful Weekend

The weekend was fab! Was in Pune to meet Kiran and we had quite a lot of fun. Somewhere on Saturday evening, we decided that we had to go to Shirdi the next day and went and bought tickets. Little did we know that Shirdi was 5 hours away! We thought it’d be a 2 hours at the most. Well… to cut the long story short, we reached there late – very late, at 2pm to be precise. We headed straight for the temple but all along the way, we a queue of people who we hoped were not waiting to enter the temple. Lady luck was not exactly in her most cheerful mood I guess and our worst fears were confirmed. If we waited in the line to go in, there was no way we could go back to office the next day, with Pune being 5 hours away and all (Mumbai – 7 hrs away), and if we didn’t, there was no darshan. So we took the easy way out. Bribes 😉 When it was time to leave, we missed our bus but got into another one, which was horrid. On the way back, the driver met with a minor accident but the other guy turned out to be some goon’s brother and soon started beating up the driver with his thug friends. After all that natak, there was no other let-up and I reached Bombay by 2am. My only worry was that I had to travel by train from here on to reach my place and anyone who knows me remotely knows that i try to avoid the trains as far as possible. So there I was, at Chembur, asking strangers where the station was. On reaching there, I found the ticket counter closed. Luckily, there was another counter on the other side of the station that was not. The ticket was REALLY cheap, for 9 bucks it allowed me to travel to my place, 6 stations away! (of course, I didn’t know that, till I boarded the right train with the help of some co-passengers). From there on, another 2 Km walk and I finally reached my place, by then it was 3am.

There has been this other thing that has been bugging me for some time now since I’ve been in Bombay. There is this constant under-current of tension that runs in all the localities here. Bombay is a an attractive city and appeals to all job hunters (i can personally vouch for that), but the infux of people from the north on the city has taken its toll and people from here don’t take kindly to these people. I constantly here phrases like, “isiliye UP se aiya hai!”, “bihari kutta” etc and I think that the ‘cosmopolitan spirit’ shit that we hear so much about is just hog wash.

On a different note, when I was at the station, I noticed the familiar weighing machines. Remember those brightly coloured boxes with bright lights and wheels behind their glass showcase? The ones on which you would stand, insert a coin and know how much you weigh? They are still around! And i couldn’t stop grinning when I saw them at the station the other day 🙂 It would be an interesting project to photograph all these weighing machines across all the stations in Bombay.

That’s about it for today folks. Cya.

j j j

Thundering Tuesday

This blog has nothing really new to offer, honestly. Two things to prove utter stupidities of people. One is the news channels and how much time and air space they eat up for something so inane that you may as well want to watch a teleshopping show for half an hour. I was surfing channels yesterday and CNN IBN 4 had such a kickass story that my jaws still hurt they dropped so badly on the concrete floor.

There was a loooooonnnngish story about how host and singer Udit Narayan’s son Aditya Narayan got kissed by a female fan in the audience on his show Sa Re Ga Ma Pa. Aditya seemed completely flustered / embarrassed about what had happened. Ismail Darbar called him and the girl on the floor and asked the girl, ‘kya kiya tumne abhi upar?’ and the brazen maiden declared with much gusto, ‘maine usko propose kiya, aur kiss kiya!’ I don’t know what happened after that because I changed the channel. But, it was good publicity gimmick
for the channel. They discussed it like something of great national importance!

So there was much hooplah over the Shilpa Shetty and Richard Gere kiss, but this was dealt with such a ‘awww! how cute’ kinda manner. I don’t have a problem with two young people kissing, but it’s not news for crying out loud!

j j j