Maximum City

"Tujhse hai zinda yeh dil ka shaher ..rozana rozanaa ... "
This is what Bachchan sahab is singing right now and am thinking not about my dil but the shaher, that is this Mumbai. I know googols of keystrokes have been keyed for describing this metropolis but still its vastness and bhaagti jindagi never ceases to invite thoughts.

I had been to Mumbai earlier during my college days but it was a temporary sojourn always, so the city never looked the way it did last year in June when I knew the stay is going to be longer than a few years (2 years of MBA + dunno how much more). The entry of our train into Mumbai, I think just before Virar, reminded me of the entry of hogwarts express into the clouded and spooky mountainous terrain of Hogwarts (Please don't chuckle, I didn't make this up just now.Try coming to Mumbai in the rainy season around June and you would know). Hogwarts it is not, but the college is a lot green and musty thoughout the rains.

The experience of local trains, lifeline of Mumbai, is a learning in itself day after day. There is a large group, amazingly women also, who love to hang on the railings of train compartments, even if seats are available. Am not sure if they are planning out Abhishek and Aishwarya's wedding or thinking of Shilpa Shetty's troubles , with the air gushing wildly through hair they gaze incessantly into the horizon. I can not dare comment on those who are sitting on roof tops. Each local train is carrying at peak hours what seems to be a million people in the 12 dabbas. The people in trains are either happy or just plain expressionless. Not sure what comes first, the quest for survival or finding happiness in small things in life or may be there are perfectly intertwined. In the lives of a majority of Mumbaiites, am sure one can not separate the moments when cribbing for good life (comfortable travelling to work-place is one important parameter to good life I think) yielded gradually to condescending existence.

One can see an excellent juxtapositioning of contradictions on local stations. The bottom 2 feets of walls and footbridges is reserved for 'rang de lal' cadre of paan / paan masala folks and on the other hand are shiny white glittering posters of Kumkum and Dulhan TV sops. I am sure earlier generations of pan masala chewing people in order to try out some newer dart boards would have tried spitting on the hoardings as well but due to awkward results of such an exercise the posters have stayed enviously white and shiny.

Once I was amazed to see two middle aged men coming back from office in the local, sitting close to each other and singing. When I took a seat next to them what I heard was not at all possible in any other city except for our Filmy Mumbai. Each one was having a book of lyrics of Mukesh and were very intently singing the songs with passion and once a song was over, they flipped pages and had quite a discussion on what should they pick next.

The life and the thoughts do not end here and am sure Mumbai will bring in lot more ... to this blog and to life ;-)

Do's and Dont's

Not the typical do's and dont's listed on the polythene bags enveloping new electronic gadgets : do not swallow or feed to cows or offer as gift to kids under 12 but just some random comparison of lifestyle changes from being a bored s/w engineer to an upcoming (funny word) MBA.

Things I DO (can't say I love all these but still)

• No time table for sleep, but there is some thumb-rule : never before 3 and not after 6 (in the night ;-0).
• Learnt the trick to sleep on chair.
• Jeans is the daily wear now.
  
• Get to Crib with friends for each rupee spent on autorickshaw or bus.
• Can afford to keep stubbles for weeks.
• Wear chappals throughout the day.
• Re-realized the importance of 'Pen is mightier than Keyboard'. Had almost forgotten how to write using pen and paper. In CSC amidst loads of copy and paste the only writing that I did for almost 3 years was marking pencil corrections on printed requirement docs or solving crosswords from TOI. Now with 2 economics, 2 HR etc courses in my pocket you can imagine the reams of paper I would have gobbled.
• Eat umpteen number of Vada Paav, get up close and personal (hope you are not misunderstanding me) with Mumabikars in locals, wait till eternity in BEST bus to reach a 12 KM distant location ...
  

Things that DON'T (or things I miss) happen in college now

• The $ sign which used to come up ringing in the eyes every start of the month.
• Miss my friends back in Noida, here it is more 'If you don't beat the shit out of me I will' attitude.
• Missing the punjabi / jatt language of dilli, chhole bhature in breakfast, hot jalebi after dinner, Gajar Halwa; Sutta in cold, foggy delhi december night, domino's pizza in office after a back breaking code/test/deliver weekend frenzy ...

PS: readers are welcome to add to the list ... i know it's a boring post but please bear with me, everyday is not a sunday.

Love is in the air

Not sure about the air but on the IP (lcoal chat client) and mails there is a lot of love. Everyone is nostalgically remembering their first love or the first departing and sending along the songs from Shiamak Dawar, Raja Hindustani, Bryan Adams to Bon Jovi (I have collected more than 15 songs of various genre and taste and I am loving this emotional chitrahar). Some hearts are brimming with regret and some others are chirping with love.

I had thought that will not sell out my pen / keyboard to these multinational conspirators who are capitalising on the softest nerve of human heart and will not write on this issue but I lost. All the corporate affairs are based on using one or the other of human fallacies and feelings. Be it jealousy of 'neighbour's envy, owner's pride' fame or fear of retirement blues for the pension plan adverts. It is only the interplay of emotions which drives our lives.

Talking of first loves, I remember the girl from my class 8th or 9th. Daughter of a military man, she was really beautiful and she (dunno why) had a special liking for me. Our group of friends used to come early to play cricket but for me cricket became a thing of the past and we used to sit in class and talk of some idle things. Now it all sounds too kiddish but there were such emotional upheavals with each and every day that I can still feel the chill. Then came the climax of my story, this girl was caught by our class teacher for fiddling with her report card to get her parent's signature. I was one of the studious guys and it just happened that I stopped talking to her (so mean of me !!). Next year she moved to another school, I heard about her once in a while but now there's no trace of her.

Some things are just priceless and are for sweet memories only !!!

P.S.: In retribution to the above I have reduced my studies and am making sure that my report card is never again a thing of pride for me.

"Your survival fight or a fanciful flight,
Your first kiss or memory of lover you miss,
An ecstatic win or the friend's grin,
A trancing shout or winning a bout,
The most beautiful dawn or a sleepy yawn,
Say it all with us .. Airtel Express yourself."

The collage was a part of our entry to create print-ad for various succesful television campaigns (ours was Airtel - Expess Yourself ). The entry was not selected :-(.

sabkuch.com is taken .... nothing's on my plate

I just finished sending a mail to someone on yahoo and saw an advertisement saying get domain names for as cheap as $1.99/yr from yahoo domains, obviously I was curious to give it a dekko. To my surprise, I keyed in some arbitrary words and found that www.kutta.com and www.kameena.com (no such site exists may be because of the fear of saffron brigade who can make a fuss out of anything on internet from orkut communities to bloggers) have already been taken :-)) ... it is not that I wanted to beat bill gates and the google wallas with hindi abuses or that they are the only things that come to my mind. I had earlier tried indiadekho.com / indiaride.com / indiafurniture.com / vidya.com etc nothing was available and (please don't smirk) in this quest I did not reach any websites which Indian censor board won't approve.

It is true that with the success stories like guruji.com, yatra.com and many more, no space on Indian vernacularscape would be left untouched. So people get going and book your slot in the web world if you have some sellable idea to be executed in a year or so.

Pyar ke Regional Effects !!

I know I shouldn't be writing this often to avoid indigestion of the vast expanse of my reader population but I had one pressing issue at hand. Just now read that domain maximus' writer Sidin got married to a punju girl. I was a regular reader of his blog (can't say that I grew up reading his blog but would have contributed a good 3-4 % hits out of the half million of his hit count). Last I'd read when he left his cozy job at ATK and planned to write, organize quizzes on his own.

The story is not about him but about marriages across the border (north-south, east-west and all other combinations). It is a happening phenomena these days as people are travelling all across the land for studying and jobs or may be because there is some conspiracy by the HRD ministry for improving gene pool of the nation. I know a lot of folks in close vicinity some of whom have seen victory and some others met defeat against the cultural wall.

I remember my farewell visit to the house of a colleague couple of mine (a mix of UP banda and Mallu bandi). They had a baby girl of about 6 months and both the grannies of the baby were present in the house. Both of them were coochie cooing the kid in their mother tongue. Once the baby cried it got to hear some mallu lullabis and a little while later was bashed in plain hindi for being a little too boisterous. The baby must be cursing them - 'Arrre baba pehle ek do words to seekh lene do mujhe kam se kam araam se' and things would get worse when her mom and dad would throw the burden of angrezi.

One more love-struck couple (MP ka banda and Bengali bandi) : their parents have agreed for the marriage but now when things come to brass tacks they are finding it really difficult. The families are having trouble finding a common ground about nitty gritties like number of sarees, mode of marriage, vegetarian vs non-vegetarian feast. They have booked friends to be ready for acting as a witness to the court marriage. I am looking forward to it, it's been long since I witnessed a court marriage (last was that in 'Sathiya' I guess).

I remember while travelling from mumbai to delhi some 2 years back, along with us in the same compartment was a marathi baraat who were coming back with their punjabi bride. The bride and groom were playfully enjoying their journey while on the other side was one KK-series-wali-not-so-good-lady murmuring to our neighbours the usual doosri-taraf-waalon-ki-burai. How tough it would have been for the two to bring the Jai Maharashtra and Sada Punjab to the same table.

I think we have come far from the days of 'Ek Duje Ke Liye ' and things are smoother for the love torn souls. We now have Mallika Sherawat and Rahul Bose in PKSE discussing the peculiarities of Dilli ki ladkiyaan versus Mumbai babes and stories of clans fighting over marriages are left for Priyadarshan comedies only.