Moments of retrospection

Dear diary,

Tomorrow, I celebrate three years of my job life. Well "celebrate", I wonder? Frankly, it has been a tiring, tedious, seeing-the-same-bullcrap-everywhere and a taxing journey.

Well you got it right. I am here to crib and vent it out.

Yesterday, I read an article which was of the title "Date a girl who travels". Not as well written as the original "Date a girl who reads", but made some sense.

Anyways, here is my story. I travel alone so many times and never a girl in my compartment and now when I was traveling with parents there was this beautiful Kashmiri girl traveling alone back to Kashmir from Delhi. Her eyes shone in the dark  like pearls but then it also reflected that she was very scared. She kept talking on the phone in the incomprehensible Kashmiri language. She even asked my dad to exchange her lower berth with dad's upper berth. I wondered why would a girl leave the lower seat and make an uncomfortable climb to the upper seat of Indian Railways. But then I was happy for I was at the other end of the upper berth. She was all the time on phone or had earphones on. But then the earphones were very loud (even under her scarf) and I could here Beatles songs being played. It made her even more beautiful.
In the morning when I woke up, I could not resist making a talk with her. She told me that she was scared because she was traveling alone for the first time and everyone back home was horrified of increasing rapes in Delhi. Thats why she had swapped her berth to upper one where it was more difficult to be reached and hence raped. And on phone when her brother had asked in Kashmiri that who else were there in the compartment she had told that there was a guy of 27-28 age (about me) but then it is assured that he would not rape me because he is traveling with his family. Yes, she told me that in complete innocence. I was shocked at hearing this and this has left an indelible expression in my mind.

Well you know, currently I am missing those moments when I used to visit her place and we would watch Charlie Chaplin movies together. (Don't ask me who this "her" is because I have written enough diary entries about her.) She would cry tonnes of tears at those impersonation of The Tramp by Charle Chaplin and I would laugh and clap at those comic scenes. But then those were one of the few moments combined of tears and laughter that I wanted the time to stand still.

Anyways, books are the only ones who are keeping me going. I am excited about this new book I am to read. Nabokov's Speak Memory. So many books, so little time!

Love,
vC

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How to crack arranged marriages?

Well, yesterday I met my old school friend who narrated me three of his most horrifying stories where he had to evaluate girls to be his potential wife in line with the doctrinal arranged marriage process. To give you a background (Strictly my opinion), my friend is a sort of a combination of 3 characters: Catcher in the rye’s Holden Caulfield (but more grown-up), English August’s Agastya Sen (but a little more complicated) and Tainspotting’s Mark Renton (minus too much of drugs).

In two of the three horrifying stories, my friend’s background had been due-diligenced on all the possible social platforms (facebook./orkut/linkedIn and others we may not be aware of). 

Girl1:

They met up in a crowded surroundings of India Gate where she told him over the phone that he could recognize her as a girl eating a pink icecream. To his dismay, there were plenty of girls eating icecream but with different shades of pink. So he called her back to check what she was wearing and that’s how he met her in her heavily dressed-up attire and gaudy make up that even if he consented to marry her, he would not recognise her on his eventful first night of marriage. She gave my friend a packed gift to which he was utterly disgusted for not having brought a return gift. She asked him to open the package she had gifted and he found out that the gift was a Sidney Sheldon’s book. He tried to hide his evident sorrow expression at being gifted a Sideny Sheldon book and evaluated that no gift is better than this gift. But then she quickly jumped up and said “hum jaante hain ki aapko padhno accha lagta hai, humne FB pe dekha (I know you like reading, I saw it on FB)”.

 Obviously, the meeting went in a disaster because the girl’s ambition was to free-ride on her husband’s money and have trips to Ooty, Darjeeling, Golden Temple, Vaishno Devi, Badrinath, Kedarnath, Amarnath and several other Shiva temples (Shivji humaare favorite bhagwaan hain/ Shiva is my favourite God) and she added humne fb par ye bhi dekha hai ki aapko ghoomna bahut pasand hai  (I have also noticed it on FB that you like traveling)

Girl2:

She was one of the pretentious film arts students (a complete contrast to Girl1) sponging on Dad’s money and was a self-proclaimed cool, arty, photographer clicking all the sadhu babas, cows and the beggars on the road. He agreed to meet her because she told him on phone (albeit with a put-on accent)- “Come dude, we will get high”. So they agreed to meet at one of the most wannabe places in Delhi called Hauz Khas Village. After they met and found a corner space to get-high, she took out from her bag all the junkie stuff-grass, pink paper, powdery substance, liquids, syringes etc. He was dumbfound at all the large syringes she took out and he was like “hey hey stop, I cant take all this syring into my body”. She was shocked at his reaction and she injected one of the drugged syringe into her fully tattooed skin. Later, she started talking of how cool she was and started mocking at his uncool job, his poor background,, his Hyundai i10 small car, his poor physique, his facebook profile picture, his facebook cover picture, his absence from twitter. She took out her camera and showed him the pictures she had clicked and he found them awful. He missed his earplugs as  that shallow, verbose and insolent girl got more and more intolerable.

Girl3:

It has less to do with the girl3 whom he could not even meet but more with her kith and kin who dropped by his house to meet the guy. He had arranged his bachelor, unkempt house to his level best but as far as I know my friend the place even at his best would be below par in terms of neatness and cleanliness. 

They dropped by to interview my friend of his credentials of keeping their girl happy where he was asked the capital of Andhra Pradesh and an arithmetic table of number 19. When he said he knew cooking, he was asked that when did one decide when rice had been fully cooked. He was asked certain embarrassing questions like was he a virgin and whether he smoked, drank, had any diseases, how much dowry was he expecting to which all the answers were satisfactory.

In reward they handed him a cash of rupees five thousand one and the phone number of girl number 3.

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Bombay revisited.

This time when I revisited Bombay, I did my usual marine drive walk from the start to the end clicking pictures of the sky changing colours. Those who have been to Marine Drive are quite aware of the street kids who sell flowers to the couples, water bottles to the thirsty and some eatables to be snacked.

In my regular photo session, I asked a bunch of kids selling flowers to pose for me. They were more than happy to do it for me. They really enjoyed being clicked and thanks to digital nature of the camera, they could see their own pictures in my camera.

This activity went on for quite a time. Then one of those kids offered me a flower (in lieu of all the photos I clicked) to which I replied that it was of no use to me. Then the other kid (whom I had clicked Dabang style, giving my sunglasses and asking him to hold his belt) asked whether I liked any girl around in the marine drive. I jokingly pointed at the girl sitting very close to us. Well, she did look pretty. Before I could say that I was joking, all of them ran to the girl and offered her a flower each. The girl was taken aback and shouted "nahi chahiye (I don't want it)". then came the coolest part when all of them in unison shouted "le lo free hai (take it, its free)". Before they could point at me or giggle while looking at me or admit that I, with the camera, was the culprit for those flowers, I ran immediately and apologised to the girl stating it was all a joke and emphasied that they were kids and I was to be blamed. She understood and said "nahi theek hai (Its OK)".

She accepted one of the flowers. The first thing that came to my mind was that had I done this in Delhi, I would have surely been beaten. Later I sat with the girl and talked for quite some time. She told me that she had noticed me clicking the kids in all poses. She loved the dabangg pose as it was the cutest. Later she asked me what did I do. I told her all about my boring managerial profession in the most interesting way I could. And when I asked her what she did, I was startled to be informed that she was one of the sex-workers from Grant Road!

No wonder, I consider Bombay my love and Delhi my wife....

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Chapters and Lessons

These following stories could be about one of us. Let us call our protagonist 'he' for it is concise and might give you an inkling of having some connection with him.

Chapter 1: B-school
Well, many of his acquaintances tend to attribute his awesomeness to his 2- year education at one of a premier B-schools in India. He was not sure whether to dispute it or to just submit to their innocent assumptions. Somehow deep inside he felt that his B-school was not much of a value-add but just a mere placement agency than some academic institution he had dreamt about. I choose to narrate one of his incidents from one of the most comic times (read: placement times) when he felt shallow and superficial about talking and looking similar as others students.

 Lesson 1: Tanking
So friends, this incident is of placement process at our protagonist's business school, when one of the companies like all other companies, astounded at the number of people interested in joining them, chose to conduct a group discussion (GD) to screen out candidates. The screened-out candidates were mainly poor students who could make themselves heard in all that chaos, pandemonium and ruckus rising out of other desperate jobless students.

The GD he was about to face had the topic "Looming crisis in Indian industries" but the organiser had said it in such a low and feeble manner that only 2 guys sitting nearest to this man/organiser were able to hear it. All the candidates shied away from asking from the organiser directly about the topic because it showed their inability to listen (which was important in a good manager) and hence asked the candidate sitting next to him about the topic. Blame it on Chinese whispers, the whole panel except for the two closest managed to understand that the topic was "Crisis in loom industry". Everyone talked about loom industry and how khadi could help redeem the loom industry and blah blah. They all shouted and yelled over the two guys who were actually aware of the original topic. They all talked about loom and loom and looming-of-our-economy just evaporated itself to the unsound nature of the entire process.

The company, which few minutes before, was very happy on the number of people interested in joining their company suddenly became unhappy over number of candidates tanking in the interview. Tanking is a term in MBA colleges where a candidate deliberately throws away his candidature as he had already been selected by some other company.

Lesson 2: How he got his job
He always felt that his CV was a disaster on both the basis of quality and quantity of it. He, who had read lots of books and was a literature student, even hesitated on writing 'reading' as his hobby because he visualized  being asked annoying questions like "Who wrote the novel- My Great MBA Days". He struggled to fill even a single page of his CV as he who had little time out of reading was a member of no committee and even had won no paper presentations. So his half page CV went to an interviewer who promptly asked him that why had he not written any of the papers or committee names as everyone in his college seemed to have been in a committee or won a paper competition. He was sure that he won't be selected  so early and hence took a chance and replied that he had not felt it relevant to write such petty victories in for interview of an esteemed organisation who surely sought brilliant students beyond their CV points like committees and paper presentation. He was selected then and there.

Chapter 2: Boarding days
Lesson 3: Where Gods lived

He graduated from one of the rare boarding colleges in India which taught literature and gave a degree of Bachelor of Arts in English Literature.

Regionalism was highly prevalent in his college and student bodies were formed based on regions ( Bihar, UP, Punjab, Andhra etc.)

Some of the best political campaigns he ever heard about were from these student parties. He once narrated me about one the seniors luring a junior to join his Uttar Pradesh party:

Senior: have you ever seen the UP map? How does it look like?
Junior: No sir.
Senior: Go and look again. it looks like a tiger.
Junior. Oh yes sir.
Senior: Do you know in which state did Gods Rama and Krishna lived?
Junior: Yes sir, in UP sir.

Hence UP party was great and thus one joined it.

Lesson 4: Word power made easy

He recounted his funny days when he used to go back to his small town during his boarding school vacation days. In small towns, uncles and aunties are the most ubiquitous and awesome species. So one of the uncle got very determined to prove that his son who was getting educated in a local school was much brighter and smarter than our 'he' who was studying in a boarding school far south of India.

So every time he passed by his uncle's house, the uncle called him and asked the spellings of some of the most commonly misspelt words and mocked at him for not spelling it rightly. He was asked the mathematical table of 31 which he could not recite and hence uncle was able to prove that his son was getting much better education by being in home than him who was traveling miles to a boarding school.

Once uncle called him for a game similar to what we call 'Antrakashari' of english words. The game was that the opponent had to utter an English word starting with an alphabet which was the last alphabet of the word uttered by the opponent. If the player 1 said love (which ends with e), player 2 had to utter evil (which starts with e) and now player 1 cannot say love as the word has been taken and hence says loser (which starts with l).

The uncle's son had learnt all the words which ended with the alphabet e and whenever our protagonist said a word like ear he was faced with race, he said elephant and he was faced with tree. An oxford dictionary was kept to be the judge. Fortunately our dude 'he' caught the game and started uttering word which ended with y like early, eagerly, easily, earnestly and our uncle's son could only manage yale, yoke.. It was funny to see the uncle's son beaten in his own game. The uncle intervened and made a rule that 'he' will not utter a word which ends with y. He laughed heartedly at his uncle's rule and left. After that uncle never ever stopped him to prove anything.

Such is life.

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Three Encounters at Rishikesh

If you are fed up of daily mundane life at Delhi, then let me suggest you that you go and visit Rishikesh. Just pick up your ruck sack, some  basic necessities, some eatables and some books and leave. Sit near the cold Ganges flowing at some great speed, see the pebbles rolling under it and get immersed to yourself.

I do it often and hence fellow readers, I bring to you three of the pleasant encounters which have been a part of my escape and self-immersion....

Encounter 1: Holy Sage

So this sage came and sat next to me while I was reading a book by the side of the Ganges. He took out his chillum, poured some marijuana in it and started smoking. And while my mind had just started taking a gap between two different poems of the book, it received a nasal signal forcing me to look up at this baba smoking up. He gazes at me for two minutes and then says "So this book, you holding is a result of you paying extra money for having a beautiful mind". It sounded something serious but gibberish to me and I replied "What?".. To which the baba replied " Do you remember you bought this book  together with another book whose cost was also same as that of this book". I gathered myself and replied "Yeah, but how do you know?". He added ".. and the cost of that book is same as this one's.. that is 399 rupees". I said shockingly "Yes". He added "Correct me if I am wrong, the bookseller trying to impress you (of her sharp calculation skills) had totaled the costs of two books as 598 (which was actually 798) and you had a doubt in your mind whether should you correct the bookseller and pay 200 rupees more or just stay with a guilt. And the rest of what happened next, you do remember my child.." I was shocked and surprised that how did this sage smoking his joint knew everything as this bookshop incident had happened in Jaipur. I could not read further and asked this sage whether he was some stalker or was he actually present there at the scene. To which he smiled and told "Nahi beta, hum bas ek yogi hain....(No son, I am just a yogi)".Till then, I had inhaled some of the marijuana out of baba's chillum...

Encounter 2: Disillusioned Guy

I noticed this guy in one corner of Rishikesh walking on the rope balancing himself, just out of pleasure. I left his corner and started walking towards a cafe when I noticed this same guy behind me and in no time he had initiated the talk "Hey, you like Calvino? I love his books". I was like yes I do. We walked and talked for few minutes and later he told me that he had been a-yet-another-corporate-guy from Bombay but was fired from his company for mixing bhang (a form of cannabis) in sweets and offering it to his top management faking his own engagement. When I asked him that why had he done so, he replied that he was so pissed off at the nonsensical absurdity of the corporate world and that just to have some fun in his boring life, he had done it. He seemed to have no regrets of his prank. There was  a certain calmness in his gesture and his talks.

Encounter 3: Kashmiri Girl

I was sitting in the German bakery at Rishikesh and was having my breakfast looking at the jhoola and the magnificent scene of people circling the Shri Trayanbakshwar Temple. I could not notice when this girl wearing some ragged clothes came and sat next to me . She was wearing torn worn clothes but still she managed to carry around her an air of special dignity, which is usually found in people who know how to carry poor clothes! I could not help noticing her as she had some magnetic effect on me. She saw me gazing at her and smiled back, a smile which was comforting and hence I began a conversation with her. She told me that she was a Kashmiri and her name was Sabbah which meant gentle breeze in Urdu. Rest of what she told me was about Kashmir which sad enough to make me choke. But her narration was so powerful, her love for life so potent, her eyes so agonizing  She was a well read girl and very versed with Urdu poets and authors. She laughed at me when I tried to fake my Urdu knowledge with few very common verses from Ghalib, Mir and others. She recited some of lesser known Urdu or Kashmiri poems mostly from Sufi poets and told me the meaning of all the couplets. Then after a while, she just stopped speaking all of a sudden and asked "Can you read something from the book you holding" and I read one of the poems from the book I was holding:

"I am troubled, immeasurably
by your eyes.
I am struck by the feather of
your soft reply.
The sound of glass
speaks quick, disdain
and conceals
what your eyes fight to explain...."

Later she left the place. But after a lot of time, I met someone of my age who had no email ids, no facebook account, no twitter page, no phone numbers but above all someone who reciprocated her name so well....

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(Not so divine) Comedy.....

1. Telephonic humor

When I came to Delhi and I took a new mobile connection from Vodafone, little was I aware that Vodafone recycled the dead mobile numbers previously used by some one else. And in my case, it had belonged to a girl named Richa.

From day one, I had been receiving phone calls for Richa from boyfriends, girl friends, interview consultants and insurance sellers (arranged in descending order of the quantity of phone calls and messages). Guys called her Richu, girls called her Moti (Hindi for fat) while interview agents and insurance sellers used her complete name. Even the timing and the content of the callers were different. Girls mostly called to congratulate her on her marriage and banged the phone on hearing a male voice in return. But the most annoying calls came during night and were mostly by drunken men/guys.After the great disappointment of hearing a male voice on the other end, they  requested me to handover the phone to the once bubbly Richa. It took a lot of  my time away from sleep to convince them that the dialed phone number did not belong to Richa anymore.

The quality of messages I used to receive were mostly those loosely rhymed romeo shayaris about the essence of love through fevicol or zandu balm. I got no second thoughts whether to call these senders because I always knew that all the flirty messages sent to me belonged to Miss Richa (who I assumed must have surrendered the number to put an end to this crap as she was ready to move on in life and wanted no masala in her new role of a simpleton wife). The calls and messages started diminishing with the passage of time and guys started to finally bear the bitter truth that their Richa had changed her number. I had also even started to forget Richa and even rejoiced the sweet truth that my cell number finally started to belong to me.

But yesterday I got a message which had a pretty decent quote and was quite flirtatious as well. I was shocked as well  as sparkled over the message and the first thing I excitingly did in the morning was to call the messenger (it was a guy) and to finally awaken the dead ghosts of Richa.

2. Strategic Humor

This time when I went home, I found that the average age of my hometown had drastically increased because all the young guys and girls had left the town either for education or for jobs. I met this uncle and despite hiding my lack of pleasure in meeting him, I enquired "Rajeev kahaan hai, uncle (Uncle, where is Rajeev)?" Rajeev was a young teenage son of our uncle who was about to start college or would have started college. Uncle replied "Beta maine use Tamil Nadu bhej diya hai engineering karne, wahaan jahaan koi hindi nahi jaanta, usko angrezi mein hi bolna padega. Isi bahaane angrezi bhi seekh jaayega aur engineering bhi (I have sent him to Tamil Nadu for engineering where no one knows Hindi. Automatically  he will have to converse in English, thats how he will learn English apart from Engineering).
I was silent for a moment and then uncle added "beta, tum to strategy manager ho, bolo kaisi lagi humaari strategy?" (Son, you are a strategy manager, tell me how did u find my strategy?)

3. Erotic Humor

If it comes to rating a city where people are most interested in other people's activities, Delhi will by far be the distant winner. I was traveling in a metro and reading one of my books. Suddenly, an aunty sitting next to me asked me that which exam was I studying for and when I replied that I was reading for pleasure (and no exam), she mocked at me asking who reads for pleasure. Then she asked me the cost of the book to which I replied that it was quite an expensive one. Then she managed to notice the price of the book (which was 350 rupees), she enquired how much had I been able to bargain and actually paid for the book. When I said that I got it on flipkart for 300, she retorted that in daryaganj, books were available for just 20 rupees. A second aunty joined in and then both the aunties started discussing at the top of their voice as how reading a book could be a pleasure experience. The second aunty mentioned that these english books were mainly erotica and hence these frustrated Indian youth even end up paying higher for erotica when they could pay lower at Dariyaganj. I did not fight or tried to prove that my book did not carry any erotica but was just a collection of poems which helped me escape from this mundane and real world....

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The two weird fests

1. The Book Fest

Well, few days ago I created this book fest and gave it an effortless name of 'the Milan Kundera book fest'..Only four people (including me) consented to participate, out of which two of them were a couple (probably in love with each other). Thankfully, I owned four Kundera books in my pint-sized library. All of us four took one book each (through a lucky draw). I got my favourite "The book of laughter and forgetting". Two of us sat on the beanbags in the cozy winter sun and the couple sat on my mattress in the sun. All four seemed like islands in my terrace; each had his own universe, immense only to himself, far beyond the grasp or interest of others. We read and read profusely in the sun. Between the gaps, I occasionally drank some droughts of water, the couple looked at each other eyes trying to locate the protagonists in each other while the fourth guy (who had Laughable Loves) just laughed out loud and clapped in tandem. My neighbors whosoever looked at my balcony, looked at we four, and tried to gather what really was happening. When the sun reached the horizon, we stopped reading (similar as in the war of Mahabharat the fest ended at the sunset), no matter how much had we read. We kept the 3 books back in my tiny library except for the Laughable Loves which by mistake kept lying on the bean bag which I had forgotten to take it inside and thus remained in the open terrace. In the night came the hailstorm (yeah it had hailed in Delhi) and laughable loves got all wet and hit and bathed by the hail. Since next day, the book lies drying up in the sun, trying to regain those lost alphabets about love, humor, women and lies......

“Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you're intelligent, because you're decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don't chase women, because you do the dishes, then I'm disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I'm crazy about you even though you're neither intelligent nor decent, even though you're a liar, an egotist, a bastard.” 
― Milan Kundera

2. The Movie fest

Well I stumbled on this movie fest being held in Chandni Chowk area (according to me: the only alive parts of Delhi) on the ubiquitous Facebook. It was showcasing movies from this director named Fatih Akin. I could not help but give up to the temptation of going to the fest because of the area where it was being held and the director whose movies they were screening. When I reached that rickety building where it was being held, I strarted getting real doubts about the invitation. But then when I reached the top floor, I saw few girls sitting on the rug with a projector infront. The only occasion I faced such a situation (the only guy amongst so many girls) was wen I had accidently climbed up a women's college bus during my engineering internship days in DRDO, Delhi. Hesitatingly I just sat down and enquired one of the girls whether it was really the venue of the movie fest or a prank. She laughed on my face and said that it was a prank by these college students of Delhi University and I was the only fool to be caught so far. I knew she was joking because the aura in the room smelt of restlessness for the start of the first movie (title:The Edge of Heaven). The fest went on fine without any goof-ups and was a wonderful experience.
Well, let me inform you that it was the same girl (who said that the fest was was a prank) went on to be a part of the couple who sat in the serious book fest mattress in my terrace reading Kundera and seeking the protagonist in her partner's eyes...

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.” 
― Goethe (the writer often quoted in the movie The Edge of Heaven)

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Saturday's dog and a squirrel

We get two days of holidays in a week to balance the rest 5 days of work (Few of us get one). Quantitatively its not a healthy work-life balance of days but then one can't help it.

"We trudge on each day, carried in our mini transporters to the zoo of caged workers typing away the black into the white and cribbing on a daily basis. The zoo keeper has not fed us enough, the zoo management does not treat us well, we feed their mouths- who will feed ours?! The banalities of life have taken over again. Time to break the curse and be free again..."- Woman with Parasol (RB)

Usually I attempt to escape Delhi on the two days alone with my camera, a ruck sack of necessities and some set of books.

“The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone” ― Donna Tartt

But this saturday, I stayed in Delhi because some old friends were supposed to visit me. By the way I have a pretty decent house with an awesome balcony where we get an honest sunshine to savour the winters of delhi. There are some flowerpots in the balcony where lately some roses and  some beautiful yellow flowers (whose name I am not aware of) have blossomed and added to the splendor of my balcony. So you can visualise that even if I am not traveling I ensure that I lie in my balcony in the sun and switch between activities of reading and sleeping..

However, this saturday our balcony was unavailable because our neighbors had asked to set up a halwai for their son's wedding. So I decided to pick up my book and do the same act of switching between sleep and books in the  lawns of India Gate.

"He realized obscurely that the sense of loneliness was too precious to be shared, and finally incommunicable, that men were, ultimately, islands; each had his own universe, immense only to himself, far beyond the grasp or the interest of others."- English August

I just bought some eatables (groundnuts, chips etc.) and a bottle of water and inhabited a good spot in the lawns near India Gate in the sun. There were not many people around (just some couples gnawing necks  and swallowing faces of each other and some workers taking rest after setting up seats for Republic day parade). I just swung between my siesta and my book (title: Short stories of Manto). I even made friends with a squirrel and a dog. Dog is an easy friend to make but squirrels are tough ones. I used that easy technique of putting ground nut at a distance and then another one closer and next one further closer and final one in my hands as a feed for squirrel. Finally a perfect symbiotic relationship between me and squirrel was developed. Squirrel for its food and me for my lonesomeness. But this broke when some other squirrels arrived and my friend had to leave a human being company for its fellow rodents.

Well, dogs are effortless friends. This dog came and sat next to me obeying its very nature of being a trustworthy species. I fed him with some chips I had bought. Then I read my Manto's stories out loud to him. Manto is one writer who slaps, kicks, pummels the society through his writing. Well Manto's stories are provocative, outrageous, blasphemous and leaves you with goosebumps at the shallowness of the society we are a part of. Anyways I read it to the dog and he seemed to follow me, would nod his head. And at the end of every story, he seemed to carry two expressions: one of praise for the author I was reading and other one had a smirk on his face as an Urdu author was stripping the already naked society.

“Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. Be it gash or gold, it will not come again in this identical guise”. ~Gwendolyn Brooks

And then finally the sun set in the background of the beautiful Lutyen's Rashtrapati Bhavan and I wrapped up my book, bought some bhel puri for the dog as a parting gift and drove my car back to home.

Ek mahal ki aad se nikla vo peela maahtaab (mehtaab=moon)
Jaise mullah ka amaama, jaise banye ki kitaab (amaama=cap)
Jaise muflis ki jawaani, jaise bewa ka shabaab (muflis=poor, bewa=widow, shabaab=beauty)
Ai gham-e dil kya karoon, ai vahshat-e dil kya karoon 

-Majaz

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Journeys

I. A journey of loss
You are at Valley of flowers completely astounded by the majestic beauty of the nature. Every kilometer you  trek ahead, colours keep changing due to change in flora around. You click pictures, try to capture the immense beauty through your camera (a camera u have possessed since long). Suddenly, the camera slips and falls out of your hand into the deep valley. You feel utterly depressed about the loss, about the camera and about the pictures in it. But the loss is so ephemeral that it evaporates and  gets so miniscule infront of the immensity of the mountains, the expanse of the clouds and the profundity of the river. You just walk ahead and keep exploring. Then just a thought comes across your mind "Probably the best work of an artist never gets published".

II. A journey of randomness
You start going down the mountain wearing a Beatles T-shirt with all four members printed on it. Out of blue, a random girl taking a rest inquires from you that when had you got the last haircut. You are taken aback by the randomness of the question from such an arbit girl. And before you recollect, she comments that that guy (pointing towards Ringo Starr) in your T-shirt resembles you with the same smile and same beard. You recollect yourself and just smile back and reply "But my favourite Beatle is John Lennon" to which she says "But mine is Ringo Starr". And then she leaves climbing the hill up humming " Mmmm I get high with a little help from my friends....". You start descending the hill with an extra energy in love with the randomness and gregariousness of that girl.

III. A journey of innocence
You reached the base camp and now set yourself for the road trip back to Delhi. And before any bus or a public vehicle arrives, you spot a school bus and take a chance at hitch-hiking on it. And after a little convincing the driver, you find yourself amidst some school children aged between 6 to 10. They are so frightened of you, conscious of the devilish new comer. From the cool Ringo Starr, you have turned some uncool monster whose backpack is heavier than their school bag. You try to be friendly and smile and put all endeavours to mingle with these kids. Finally after a lot of attempts, they find you friendly and start accommodating you. And before it all ends, you find yourself singing "Why this kolaveri Kolaveri Di" with the kids.

IV. A journey of laughter
You are sitting at a dhaba alone enroute Rishikesh. And in the next table, there are sitting 5 Sikh men. They call the waiter who is also a Sikh guy and order: "Teen chai ko paanch cup mein daal kar lao (Bring 3 cups of tea poured into 5 cups)". The Sikh waiter replies "Ye kaise hoga? Teen cup chai teen mein hi aayegi (How is that possible? 3 cups tea will come only in 3 cups only)". There starts a min-brawl which has started with 5 sikhs explaining 1 Sikh about how to pour 3 cups of tea in 5 cups. It gets so hilarious because of the trivial nature of the source of the dispute. Finally you get up and intervene ordering 3 full cups of tea and 2 empty cups from the waiter. Everyone (the six sardaars) is so relieved and rejoicing at the solution that they end up ordering 3 empty cups instead of two empty because the sixth guy sharing in the tea party is you!

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PS: All the journeys are based on true incidents.

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