News time

snippets :

* I was coming out of the mumbai airport in an autorickshaw after booking tickets to delhi, basking in the glory of India Poised / Globalisation / WTO / privatisation of airports (and lots of other things) and feeling elated at having given some meaning to my life by winning a free air ticket. On the traffic signal I saw one girl about 6-7 years old, in tattered clothes and was begging for some money. She put her face close to the window of the merc standing just next to my rickshaw and by folding her hands around her eyes she peeked into the car and was continously murmuring 'hey madam please ...'. She did not get anything and once the light turned green she left towards the road divider and went over to the other side of the road. Don't know why I did not feel any pity rather one thought struck me : will this girl ever be able to ride a car let alone fly on an airplane. I am sure any benefits of the progress and development that the country makes are infinite years away from lots of people like this girl.

* Had the luck to listen to Nandita Das at WIMWI in their cult fest. The people from dramatics / classical music / theater etc have an eerie calmness about them. She was perfectly poised and talked at length about her life and her style of choosing only the most remote and unknown movies, her social service. Especially touching was her narration of incidents which took place when they had arranged for a game of cricket and tour to pakistan for a group of street children.

* In the campus, people have gone crazy over solving case studies and other contests and are busy pocketing decent (worth one party) sums of money. I have full confidence that some of them have still undiscovered pschizophrenic problem, they have invented imaginary colleges and are solving case studies of their own making. They have wasted gigs of memory for only powerpoint and MS word documents . Even Google would have surrendered to their searching apetite.

and so the life goes on and so do we ....

Run Mumbai Run !!

I felt proud at being a part of the Mumbai Marathon this sunday. It was a spectacular display of corporate revelry and citizenship. Mumbai looks beautiful while running - it is running daily in any case - but this time people were running for somewhat selfless reasons. Daily people push and jostle with each other for a window seat in the local train or a piece of floor in the compartment just sufficient to put a foot. At times folks are expressionless as the cast of 'City of the dead' but still living in Mumbai one can know very soon that it has got a heart - just ask for directions from someone and he would make sure that you are on the correct bus / train and people in general are there to help except for the autorick walaa who would want the best slice of your skin.
Apart from the gorgeous Kingfisher and Standard Chartered cheer leaders there were other feel-good sights as well like the persons on wheelchair (some of them very beautifully dressed) and some Amrish Puri style dads pushing and ecouraging there kids - run beta run only the last kilometer is left !! .
I was not aware of the enormous amount of charity that gets generated through this.The runners can get corporates to sponsor you and the money gets donated to various NGOs. It makes it even more worthwhile to run - you run for your health, for revelry, for fun, for citizenship and for a noble cause. This time we were running for no cause or may be
there was a subliminal cause of being associated with the society.

Am back with a kahani :-)

Many cubic meters of water has flown down the volga ( don't ask why volga, jlt ) since I last sat down to write on the blog.

Something weird happened on my trip back home in december. After the exams I was all spick and span, ready for the mumbai delhi flight and had made sufficient arrangements, or so i thought, to fight the cold in delhi but the civil aviation ministry, the low cost airline industry in india and god of rains indra (don't know who takes the responsibility of fog. It is close to clouds and rains so let it be him please) had other plans. Please don't close the window, it is not the usual stranded-passenger-struck-@-airport-cursing-on-Aaj-Tak story, it's different. Amazingly the flight was on time. The in-flight crew was courteous. This is inspite of the fact that she refused to give me change for a rupee 500 note for a 60 rupee lunch package which consisted of one small sized samosa, which people back in delhi would gulp in a single bite, two cookies and two slices of bread with butter and if it wasn't for my papi pet I wouldn't have spent that handsome load of money on this packet . My neighbour and I started off on a good note (the pun intended as the lady sitting next to me helped me with the change). After about an hour, the flight attendant came with a box full of boarding passes of all the passengers and said they were offering 3 fortune free return tickets for the lucky winners and he went to some kids for taking out the names.

The winners started making their miss-world-winner-esque awe and ooh gesture, one dropped a tear and some other winner jumped in the seat only to bump his head in the overhead bin. All the people in close vicinity turned to catch slightest glimpse of the winner (so that while getting down they could show their children look betaa !! this is what winners look like, this guy is only next to sachin tendulkar in achievements ). Only one more winner was to be declared and when I heard my seat number I did not know how to react, the flight attendant came and collected my details. Congratulations started pouring in from the remotest corners of the country/flight despite of the seat-belt sign on people came to give me a hug . (No please don't smirk, I don't know how to look awe struck in Aishwarya Rai style and I definitely did not bump my head on the overhead bin you can ask the lady sitting next to me on 4D seat ).

I was feeling like Manmohan Singh would have felt if he ever won a lok sabha election ( again you are not allowed to question my analogies, this is MY BLOG ok ?) (the analogy was corrected after someone pointed out, see comment) but the climax was yet to come. The captain announced that due to inclement weather conditions we can not land in delhi and none of the airports were ready to let us in and hence we were flying back to MUMBAI, everybody gave a sigh of disbelief. The announcement came as a shock to some as if Ayesha Takia had just dumped them. GoAir was ready to fly us back to delhi the next day and nothing much could be done at half past 12 when we landed back in mumbai and so after a dinner of bread omlette I had to go back to my hostel . My meeting with the 'dilli ki sardi' had been delayed. Nonetheless I went to delhi the next day and then after a rocking party in CP went to my home later and now this trimester is one 'GURU' and one visit to Kashid beach old :-).... more on that later ... stay happy !!!