Journey down the memory-lane–on buses.

*Long, rambling post warning*

Even as a child I used to treasure the most inanimate and bizzarely mundane objects. Like buses. I mean when I look back its both intriguing and oddly embarassing that I could be obsessed by an ugly rectangle of iron on wheels.

But I just was. Paying homage to another one of my weird hobbies in this random post, I’d like to thank Jedi for his well felt article on a bus ride.

The School Bus:

As a kid, the word bus was synonymous with taking a bath, getting ready quickly, and running off lugging a 20 kg bag. Yes, I used to love my school bus. And given that I was about 10-12 kms far out from the BHEL industrial town where my school DPS was, my bus stop usually was the second one (Notice the use of the word “my” hehe). Freshly scrubbed and neatly combed with water bottle hanging down my neck, I used to religiously sit with my bag neatly sat on my thighs and from the open window, enjoy the trees and houses whiz past.

After 8 hours of playing in the sun, poem recitals, drawing and sums in a typical school day, I still remember the way our class teacher used to form 3 queues for 3 different school buses which used to leave all non BHEL kids to various neighbourhoods in Hardwar. Now the Green Bus, (which was my bus) was, to me, the most insignificant of them all. It had only three stops, all in close vicinity, but the part that made it most boring was that it was the only bus owned by the school. So the seats were standard metal bar-atop-hard cushion stuff. And when it was hot, we really had a hard time for the whole half hour it took for the bus to reach home.

Compared to our Green Bus, the kids travelling by Yellow and the Brown buses really seemed to have it all–the buses each took an hour long trip around Hardwar taking them everywhere from Har-Ki-Pauri (famous bathing ghat on Ganges) to Jwalapur (a hustling bustling market) through atleast 5 over-Ganges bridges and 3 over-railway bridges. On top of the sightseeing, since the school had given the contracts of both the bus routes to private coach companies, the kids had luxury coaches with television sets and individual bucket seats which were foamed so generously, the kids practically sat in them and not on them.

But to my utter dismay, concepts as complex as “softer seats and movies on TV” were lost on my fellow mates back then. Like sheep getting herded, they used to lug themselves obediently to their own buses with their colour coded bus passes safety-pinned to their shirts, day in and day out. And I remember reluctantly following them to my Green Bus as all my attempts to use my Camel crayons to turn green into yellow or brown were in vain.

My only hope of getting on those luxury buses was if I wanted to go to my daadi’s (grandma’s-god bless her soul) place, who used to live in proper, old, ashram-infested part of Hardwar. At this point it must be said that my mom-dad had separated from my daadi and decidedly wicked buas and the only way I’d ever get to go to daadi’s place is if mom stomped her way out on an argument (always thanks to my buas and co. let me add) with dad to a friend’s place. So even though my heart bled when my parents fought over some family problem, secretly a part of me was glad that a trip on the Yellow Bus was very close. So yea, I was that mad for travelling on buses even back then.

I also quite clearly remember how I was rebuked quite hard by my mom as I was smugly reciting to her an incident where I had raced with one of my sworn bus-enemies to loot a seat. She actually was quite surprised that I used the word “loot” and behaved bandit-like when it came to getting seats on the bus. And then went a long lecture on the lines of “you don’t own the seat” and so on, none of which had any effect on me back then. All that mattered was “my seat” in “my school bus” and I made sure I had it every morning and every afternoon. What really was so special about this seat was that firstly, it really was housed atop the rear-wheel arch, which meant that standing atop the arch I could get a high view with the elbow neatly rested on the window’s perimeter. Also, it was the only seat perfectly aligned with the window’s start and end which made the seating position just a tad more special.

The bus-drivers we had for school buses were also more like rally drivers in the making and in the not-so-common co-incidence of two buses exiting the school at the same time, the race that ensued after that was the stuff lovers of truck racing would give an eye and a tooth for. There were bets, there was cheering and there was booing and every roundabout, every common bus stop became the place where destinies were changed. The winning bus would suddenly lose it at the last bus stop if a 6 year old girl forgot her water bottle on her seat and had to go back to get it.

And then, during the rains, when the sides of roads were filled with shallow puddles, there was something bizarrely hypnotic about the bus splashing through every one of these. This, and the tyres sending a trail of dust on the more drier days–I just wouldn’t tire out of finding such mundane stuff fascinating.

The Toys and the Games:

The Hot Wheels buses I used to play with (ditto these)

From Hot Wheels to clunky wood to plastic Leo, I was always adamant on getting only the bus and truck models. And not the keyed or remote-controlled ones which used to bug me with the mind of their own, flashy artificial lights and monotonous sounds. I remember keeping it always real and simple with my playthings. They were all manually draggable models and I used to stage full blown traffic scenarios of dangerous over-takes and traffic jams by humming the throttle sounds and mouthing peep peep, pom-pom for horns.

From verandahs, to porches, to beds, to parapets on roofs, to balustrades in balconies, almost every place in the house was a life-like simulation for the real roads. Especially the balconies, where a single hard hit or brush with my own sleeve ended some swanky new cars in the open drain two floors below. Almost like a bus falling in an avalanche.

The public transport:

Since the first few years we were living on rent, we had to move our house every couple of years within the town. Now in a place like Hardwar, there were only two “real” roads, one–the main road which used to run along the town’s midway and the other, a no-speed-barred national highway running on the other side of the river. Both were connected supremely well with bridges and streets and kutcha roads and galis. But being the only two roads, bus-sighting could only be done if you lived anywhere near these two roads. And sure enough, I was in for a treat when we moved just off the main road when I was about 8-9 years. Here, I developed a new hobby of observing the public transport buses in my free time and reading where they went. And I used to love the logic behind it all. Each bus with a specific destination had its own time. And its own unique personality. Like the buses going to Rajasthan were always Ashok Leyland models with sharp grunting exhaust than the ubiquituous TATA models which had a balmier, low pitched gruff to them. And then there were the Punjab and Haryana buses which besides being coloured all funny (grey on the whole with multi-coloured stripes on window bars) used to be driven with such godspeed that I would never used to make out the destination. Mostly they were written in Gurmukhi anyway. There were also the regular Delhi buses always painted in white and always stating out their status in red paint “semi-deluxe coach” or “super-deluxe coach”.

Other than the state-by-state classification, one could easily deduce the en-route conditions (atleast I thought I could) just by looking at the state of the buses. The ones travelling to towns like Muzaffarnagar, Chutmulpur, Etawah, Nazibabad, Saharanpur had their sides stained with streams and streams of dried vomit and paan stains. And their wheel arches clogged with tons and tons of mud. Even the windows tended to be cloudiest in such buses (proof of people lying about with their thickly oiled heads on the panes). Every bus had a story to tell, and I used to enjoy every minute of fly-past inspection of mine.

Although I myself had travelled to Delhi innumerable times by DTC’s semi-deluxe and deluxe coaches, the memory of one incident circa 1995 still sends shivers down my spine. It was mid-August and my family had taken a night-bus from New Delhi at about 8 PM. Now, by schedule we should have been home by 1 or 2 AM, but given the rainy season, we had to traverse through many semi-flooded (2-3 feet deep in water) towns and villages, so we added 2 hours more to the equation. But halfway through the journey, we entered a jam that extended to as far as we could see. Given that our national highways are never ever lit, cars and buses standing one behind the other revealed precious little about the cause of the jam.

Half an hour and some voluntary enquiries later, it was revealed that a newly built bridge had been burst by a big monsoon river (apparently a sight of every monsoon thanks to the ever-corrupt thekedaars) and that we’d have to wait till morning before the flow subsided. Cut to 10:30 AM the next morning and our bus was crawling along with the traffic ahead as we finally entered the point where the road abruptly led to a river bed. The bridge was nowhere in sight and it was quite a horrific sight on the right side as some of the brave ones who had tried to rush it during the night time had their Marutis and Ambassadors smashed and upturned brutally on the river bank. Amidst this sight, our driver began the slow march into the river bed. Within a matter of hours, the river had visibly reduced from a muddy monster to a deceptively innocuous, clear-watered, shallow (albeit still broad) river. Upon entering a relatively muddier patch, our driver did the unthinkable. He pressed on the gas pedal to gallop past the crawling traffic and the one thing we all were dreading, occurred. Yes, you guessed it–in the middle of that river-we got stuck. Given the luggage (both human and otherwise) that everyone carried, I remember everyone deciding against getting off the bus and the conductor finally getting two tractors from a nearby field to tow us out of the quicksandy bed to the road. What a trip that was and to sit in the bus while its been towed from the front (risen from front) was quite something.

Many moons later, around 2001, when I was doing my 11th Std. at school, we had moved to Rishikesh (30 kms from Hardwar) in 1999 but I had never changed my school. This meant that I had to catch a public transport bus at 5 in the morning to get 13 kms closer to Hardwar at a huge army cantonment in Raiwala from where an Army Bus carrying all the kids from the Army families went all the way to school. Now, Rishikesh being a smaller and less developed town had a single bus stop to its credit. And the only bus to start that early in the morning was a Punjab transport one. Now, to get to the bus stop alone, I had to catch a motorised three-wheeler (also called Vikram) and after 15 minutes of loud hollering of “Tum to Thehre Pardesi” by godawful Altaf Raja first thing in the morning, I was subjected to a drive of my life. The Sardar drivers with their newly-oiled-and-pinned beards pushed the accelerator so hard, that it hardly ever took them more than 9 minutes to manuvere through 13 kms of potholes, scooters, rickshaws, Vikrams, oncoming lorries and stray cows. I vaguely remember the thrill ride, sitting on the edge of my seat watching through the front windscreen in case we hit something.

A view of downtown Rishikesh with Vikrams and its lone main-road which doubles up as the gateway to Himalayas.

In the Jan of 2001, there actually was a bomb-blast on the Republic Day night at the bus depot the remains of which, some two days later, I remember seeing. To see a bus so completely blown-up (I remember its roof curved all the way to the sky with the blast’s impact) with cloth, suitcase tatters and glass pieces all spread around it–there really is nothing more sombre a sight than to see such a scene.

London:

Cut to 2002, and its been more than four years that I have relied on the buses for commuting.

The No.25–the bus to my uni.

The double deckers, the bendy ones, the short ones, the old ones with TCs–you name it. Given my lax time-management skills, I have pleaded drivers to open doors at traffic lights, have had my breakfast, lunch and dinner more than once atop one of these, have done a full change of clothes atleast 2-3 times getting ready for rowing straight after a lecture at uni with more than 20 people on-board. Yea, its been fun and games alright, but the four things that make the london buses what they are, for me would be:

1. The Fares: From a tolerable 70p a commute (can be anywhere between 1 stop ahead to the last bus stop) four years ago, to a steep £1.50, the bus tickets are a rip-off. The one-day and weekly bus passes are still a bargain. But the way the fares are managed on the new bendy buses—the drivers don’t check whether your bus pass is valid and you get through any of the doors–means its easier than ever to hop on and off free of cost than ever before. Which pisses the regular fare payers like me no end.

2. The Bus-Stops: Given that you live in London, you are never more than a few yards away from one. It infiltrates every imaginable street and minor road, the connections are impossible to find fault with and in just every way, bus routes are tailor-made for the local people to get to anywhere and everywhere they’d like.

3. The Buses: One really does feel well looked after amidst 4 CCTVs (2 if its a single decker), reasonably comfy chairs for seating and always enough space to stand or hang from one hand. The automated platform-lowering and a wheelchair-wide space inside for prams and wheelchairs are design benchmarks for accessibility. Even after all these years, I still quite like touching my Oyster card on the ticket-checking machine which sits with the driver or pushing the Stop button on any pole to stop at the next stop. That, and the heaters running longitudinally all through the bus are a blessing in the winters. The plasma screens now been fitted in buses city-wide for advertising and what’s on is quite classy indeed.

4. The Cliches: They are most impunctual when you need them the most. You-wait-for-one-for-an-hour-and-then-three-come-along kind of thing which really does one’s head in. This, and the fact that there are no windows (just flip-open ventilators) mean inside temperatures can go upto 51 deg C (like it did today).

So, there you have it– my memories with buses as small as the Hot Wheels drag bus to the London double decker. Now let me get some sleep to be ready for an early morning commute tomorrow to my workplace by bus in what’s reported to be London’s hottest day in years.

The dilemma of what to read!

*Lousy post warning!*

Of late I have become so fussy about buying a book, that I am actually quite amazed that there was a time when I was mad about fiction. But seriously what do you pick? Almost everything has a sense of deja vu attached to it. Enter any WHSmiths store and you have fiction easily classifiable into these catgories:

1. The wannabe Da Vinci Codes: This phenomenon has been on the book shelves since early last year, and it sucks. And I am referring to the Grail which the whole publishing world is frigging mad about . The plot–A murder mystery that spirals into some weird kind of historically revealing quest. Give or take a few changes, the basic story is a mere means to an end of some bizarre revelation about some sect or some secret society. I mean why would I read 600 pages of something that’s no-way as controversial or relevant and tries to be as smart as the Code. Some worthy new examples:

2. The chick-lits: Terribly sexist I know, but I just won’t pay up to read a good 500 pages just to find out how a certain Kathryn reacted when her friend slept with her fiance. And no I don’t care if a certain Ms Darcy Rhone starts to think that there’s more to life than just getting inside a size 6. Worthy new examples:

3. Hey! Look I am quirky: Now these are the sort of books which have plotlines not complicated just because they should be, but because they can be. Bizarre covers and blurbs add to the shock value but its the same old family yarn/scandal from the first page. Give me one good reason why I should spend my £10 and 5 hours on these and not watch another episode of EastEnders or Hollyoaks. Yes, you won’t find me holding any of these:

4. Yet another generic thriller: These are vomited out in dizzyingly rapid succession by the supposed thespians of the genre but are indeed so minimalistic and rushed (that, and shamefully spaced out and margined by publishers), it only takes reading one or two to know that you have just been ripped off for reading something that CSI on Channel 5 (which is free) would have shown you with far more speed and audio-visual razzmatazz. So no I am not reading any of these:

5. Read my sob story: Blame Dave Pelzer and his “A Child Called It” for this depressing stream of books where everyone seems to be kicked, bruised, strangled and made to drink Baygon in their childhood. It happens-yes. Do I want to spend my leisure time reading every such account of abuse in graphic detail? Hell no. So, these are out as well:

And no, I am not into classics, biographies, autobiographies, Terry Pratchetts or any of the fantasy world ilk, tired and I am past the age of getting any fun from Stephen Kings, Dean Koontzes, Robin Cooks, John Grishams and Michael Palmers. And yes, I have had enough of Jeremy Clarkson’s wisecracks too. So I won’t be reading all of this as well:

Yea, you can accuse me all you want for my shallow comments and my stinginess on books-to-be-picked, but seriously nothing on the bookshelves catches my fancy nowadays.

And no I just can’t trust a newspaper critic’s opinion on something I am going to spend much of my week with. Yes, I have seen some very ghastly and truly horrible pieces of writing applauded and awarded for being the best writing ever, and so I have stopped following newspaper reviews altogether.

So where does that leave me? With my gut instinct. I finally I left it to sheer luck to fetch me a book that’s fresh, intelligent, dense, incisive, sharp, honest, funny, inventive and above all has the ability to hook me all through and is worth my time. Did I find it? Oh YES.

And its called… All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses An Eye.

I am halfway through the book and I can’t believe how good it is. To sum it up, its more of a Dan Brown meets Ian McEwan (just what I wanted!). Yup, its got the speed, the thrill, the menace and its a brilliant character study. Atleast in my reasonably credible (so much for modesty hehe) reading vocation, I have seldom come across a thriller which treats the characters with as much respect as the plot. And what language! I have never read a book in this genre that’s this quotable or that actually feels as if some thought really has gone into sentence construction. Plus its fiendishly inventive. It doesn’t feel like a story crafted to get the sales and the bucks. Its real. its funny. Its just downright fantastic.

For those interested, here’s a synopsis:

“As a teenager Jane Bell had dreamt of playing in the casinos of Monte Carlo in the company of James Bond, but in her punk phase she’d got herself pregnant and by the time she reaches forty-six she’s a grandmother, her dreams as dry as the dust her Dyson sucks up from her hall carpet every day. Then her son Ross, a researcher working for an arms manufacturer in Switzerland, is forced to disappear before some characters cut from the same cloth as Blofeld persuade him to part with the secrets of his research. But they are not the only ones desperate to locate him. A team of security experts is hired by Ross’s firm: headed by the enigmatic Bett, his staff have little in common apart from total professionalism and a thorough disregard for the law. Bett believes the key to Ross’s whereabouts is his mother, and in one respect he is right, but even he is taken aback by the verve underlying her determination to secure her son’s safety as she learns the black arts of quiet subterfuge and violent attack. The teenage dreams of fast cars, high-tech firepower and extreme action had always promised to be fun and games, but in real life it’s likely someone is going to lose an eye … “

I am just glad I waited a good four months after McEwan to finally finish this book. I am already your fan Mr. Brookmyre, and going by the list of books you have written, I look forward to be entertained for the rest of the year. Yoohoo!

Call me a weirdo!

Now blogging is the last thing I should be doing at this time of the year, but a tag about unleashing the quirky “me” was too good an oppurtunity to resist. So after some hard thinking, I have zeroed onto the “five” weirdest things that even I can’t completely believe are a part of me. Enjoy!

1. Kill-Joy

Nicknamed by every imaginable teacher as a “well-behaved, cultured” student, my 16 years at school saw me through 2 big fights (abnormal I know, but that’s me), but both of them are just too unexpectedly gory (than violent). You can decide which one is more horrible–

a) The one in first standard: A normal argument in the lunch hour with a boy sitting next to me turned into a I’ll-throw-your-bag-if-you-touch-mine challenge. Which led onto me touching his bag. And him throwing mine on the floor. And then I threw his bag in a fit of rage. And while he was picking his books, I actually remember kicking them. Which understandably made him furious and he ran to my side of the floor (where my bag’s contents were still spilled), picked one of my books at random and started tearing a few pages. And this is the worst part–I still can’t believe I did this–but I remember pulling his head upright with both my hands locked into his hair. In fact I pulled so hard that not only did I pull a good bunch of hair but a piece of scalp as well. Although the precise details are fuzzy, I remember the sudden shell-shocked look on the uptil-then chattering class mates. The guy whose head I managed to rip was bleeding profusely and I remember getting busy with pleading to the class fellows around me to pretend as if nothing’s happened (yes, even back then covering my tracks was more important than someone’s life LOL). But two girls had already reported it and I was summoned to the head mistress’ office and a reasonable amount of hell ensued at home as well. I still find the incident weird as it happened when I was all of 6. Maybe I was quite unaware of my strength back then. Although I do vaguely remember getting suprised by the result of my pulling, the fact that I resorted to such an insane way to bring down a person was quite bizarre.

b) A sequel of sorts that occurred seven years later when I again got into an argument with a boy sitting next to me. But this time it started with us suddenly defending our respective territory on-desk with outstretched hands. An accidental breach by the partner led me to poke him lightly on the back of his hand with my Reynolds pen. But guess he just wasn’t in a good mood and he poked me back rather violently. I got hurt a little (the pinprick puncture had started to bleed) which angered me so much that right then I opened my geometry box, took a compass out and literally stabbed the guy at the back of his hand. Don’t ask me if it came through the other side or not, but somehow it didn’t bleed that much and we started punching and kicking each other. All the class made a circle around us as us two otherwise-saintly students locked horns. I don’t know how long it went for but what I do remember is going back to my desk, wiping the blood off my compass and desk and sitting through the day as if nothing had happened. That qualifies for weird. Moral of the story– I can tear, puncture and peel flesh off people without batting an eyelid. So getting into medicine wasn’t exactly the decision of my head (wink wink)

2. Run for cover

Previews, back cover blurbs, cover photography, titles–Things that I am sure connoisseurs of cinema and books wouldn’t care a damn about, but are the very things that decide what I am going to watch and read next. In fact over the years, I have noticed that my most cherished films and fiction also sport the covers and titles I absolutely fell for at the first sight. Plus, I have found that I can see through even the most manipulatively crafted previews to make out whether its a movie I’ll enjoy or not. And 9 out of 10 times it works. Which is rather weird.

3. Even or Odd?

Given that guys generally are more autistic, it isn’t any surprise that one of my favourite passtimes while sitting everyday in the loo is counting song lyrics to find out if every line or couplet has the same number of words. Yea, its the most braindead things one can do, and there’s absolutely no sense to it. But I have been enjoying it without fail since as far back as I can remember. There are even weirder things I do on random days to keep myself busy while walking–like estimating how many steps it would take me from station to uni and then counting them as I walk, or calculating the number of seconds its been since an event happened. And there even was a time when I had come to believe that *adult alert* j*cking off odd number of times led on to a crappy day (and vice versa).

4. Eight-o-phobia

Now this is what happens when you read Cheiro’s book of numerology when you are all of 9. The legendary astrologer always dropped not-so-subtle hints about how unlucky dates coming to number 8 can be. Or how doomed and/or unreliable people born on these dates/years really are. Coincidence in the following years meant that bad things tended to happen on these very dates (or probably it was just me expecting/interpreting them) until last year when my life did me one better and believe it or not, some of the most crucial days, exams, results, goodbyes, admission numbers, bank passcodes–all added up to number 8. Has this led me to drop my superstition? No way. I hated Fanaa which released on the 26th of May LOL. As you can see, the damage being done here is far deeper.

5. The (un)usual suspects

Yes, quite like everyone else (more like Suyog who tagged me), I have gorged on chalk, raw coriander; hate to read old, yellowed books written in beady times new roman-esque fonts; and as a child I even have, to my credit, getting a newly built greenhouse down of a neighbour by pelting stones (the reason–mom was emptying a decorative fountain and wanted to get rid of a few of them and I was too lazy to go down one floor in the blazing heat of summer afternoon. So I just flung them in the air and every one of them shattered the neighbour’s decidedly big all-glass conservatory. Yes, I could hear something breaking my side of the wall but that didn’t stop me of throwing. Thankfully, they weren’t home and they even set up a neighbourhood enquiry to find the culprit, but as I had grabbed those stones from the porch of a house just three houses down the lane, the battle ensued between the wrong parties. I confessed on having done that many years later when we moved to London, and no matter how disgusted my parents were, they still didn’t mind laughing it off.)

Phew… turns out I am weirder than I thought. Oh well… thanks a ton Suyo (yes, why I sometimes call you that and not Suyog is again weird!) for tagging me.

Angry!

Okay so I hadn't planned my first "personal" post for my post to be all about spitting venom. But this is how, I guess , its meant to be. Am just back from another of my monster exams (for the uninitiated, it was a neuroanatomy-locomotor combo exam) and am pissed as hell. So after cramming up every flipping nerve, artery, vein, muscle, joint, meniscus, ligament, bony landmark in the limbs; every ascending, decussating, descending tract; every goddamn dorsal, ventral, medial, lateral, cranial nucleus, every gyrus and sulcus of the cerebral cortex;every tiny branch of sinuses draining and carotids bathing the brain; every lesion and every clinical test —you have an exam that's more puzzling than the Killer Sudoku.

Its just bloody unfair. When you know you really "know" your stuff but the examiner does one better and plonks one trick question on another. Oh well… I guess I could whine like there's no tomorrow. No point. Am glad its over. Worried as hell for the end of years now which'll have all of today's + everything else done in the year. Which is approximately some 90 lectures (average 50 new concepts and words in each), 40 practicals, 50 PBL scenarios… hope I make through that. Phew!

At the end of the day though, the real charm of medicine is making more and more sense of the machine de ultimate-The human body as every year passes. Wow! One look at the larger scheme of things and I feel much calmer.

Now with one more exam down, I should have some time to post my movie reviews. Saw Ice Age 2 on my birthday. Crap. Then, moved to a new place and watched a lot of Bollywood. Malamaal Weekly-good. Taxi No 9211-very good. Humko Deewana Kar Gaye-hara kiri. Salaam Namaste (5th watch, kindly note)-adorable movie. Dil To Pagal Hai (~70th watch)-Madhuri is timeless.

Dying to watch Mission Impossible 3 and Fanaa. And X-3. And of course, The Da Vinci Code.

More later.