Downtown Train..

It starts with “Outside another yellow moon, has punched a hole in the night-time mist…” and goes on to talk about Brooklyn girls, and heart attacks, and thorns and roses, and of course, about downtown trains. I heard this song for the first time about 15 years ago, thanks to my sister who was into picking up the latest grammy nominations cassettes (and who is, as I might have mentioned in passing, responsible for my love of the English language), and perhaps thanks also to the fact that I hadn’t been introduced to rock (as I know it), and would therefore not look with disdain upon anything that was “pop”ular in nature.
I don’t know under which strict genre this song falls, but it has somehow stuck in what appears to be more than a corner of my brain; and every so often, as things move within my head, this song perhaps gets dislodged around, making me listen to it again. And as I write this (while admiring the extremely picturesque late monsoon view from the Pune-Mumbai expressway), what comes flashing by are not the exact years that have gone by, but the phases of life that touched and went.
The time when I was the age of those Brooklyn girls, till the time I moved out of my home to stay away, and have been shifting houses (not homes, thankfully) since then. Then the phase when I started earning (for myself, and for those “carnivals”). Then back to school (“I know your window, and I know it’s too late…”), and then now, dropped into a city where the trains (downtown or otherwise) are literally “full” in much more than the actual feel of the word.
And thus here we are, subjecting ourselves to the vagaries of these journeys, almost half expecting to hear an answer to “Will I see you tonight, on the downtown train…?”

P.S.: "Downtown Train" is a song by Rod Stewart

Of directions

There's a certain kind of expertise this country's travelers have built into their DNA. It's a kind of daily practice of adventure activities like treasure hunting. Anybody who needs to visit different places in a city everyday (read salespeople :)) would probably agree with me that reaching a place in time is like finding that X which marks the proverbial spot. You get all kinds of pointers from anyone you ask. To modify a well-known adage, "directions are like ass-holes, everybody's got one".
From the very direct "just next to the CCD on SV Road" to the slighly obscure "take the left from where it says No Left Turn", to something more complex "after you have crossed the toll booth, keep going till you have traveled on two fly-overs and then take the second left from under the third fly-over just before the Shiv Sagar", to something so outrageous that it would take hunting dogs to figure out the damn place "take the first right after the children's school on the left, then keep going straight till you see the HP petrol station from where go straight till you reach a three-way fork in the road, take the right-most road till you reach the ladies' tailor, and then ask him for further directions..."
Part of the excitement of visiting a new restaurant is in finding the shortest path to it (of course the shortest path will go through a number of left and right bylanes of which if you lose count, you might have to just come back home and make an omelette for dinner). Reminds me of those obscure optimization problems we used to do in those courses on Operational Research. Except that it was on paper and you could literally go all over the place with your guesswork.
But gone are those days, and tonight I am planning to visit a new clothes showroom somewhere in Santacruz west. Any directions, please?

Independence Day...

....Is here... and there would be half a trillion Indians (our population would be around that much, I suppose?) writing about it. It's a day that invokes a wonderful concoction of hues, shades, and colors (including those on our local tricolor). It's my second independence day in Mumbai, and the short, brisk shots of rain in this city are perfectly in sync with the equally unpredictable nature of our central and state politics.
There are fears of violence, and probably justified. Somebody somewhere is probably hatching their own jehadi plot, trying to drown the sound of fire-crackers with probably louder noises...
There are the Indian cricket team players, who have given us a wonderful independence day gift...
There are the daily fresh crops of potholes which seem to grow with alarming rates on the jungle of our roads, as if they have superior evolotionary advantage compared to the gigantic fly-overs...
There are the mindless Bollywood movies churned out like the exhaust from a crowded kitchen where too many cooks are happily busy spoiling the broth...
There are the daily dreams that get crushed, reminding us that rather than forgetting what has happened to us, we seem to remember more what could not happen to us...
There are also the multi-millionaires that are being created as this nation continues with repeated drumrolls on its acquisitioning march across the planet...
There are...
..well, lots of things as you can imagine... everything has it's own significance on this particularly significant independence day. And although 60 is the traditional retirement age across most Indian companies, we can always hope that this country will continue to work as hard as ever, whatever be the results...

Power of Powerpoint

Some say "death by powerpoint", while some are actually alive because of it.

Take a look, you be the judge...

Attendance...

Most schools have these rules of attendance. Less than 75% and you lose a point in your grade, or you can't appear for final exams (no one wants to, but that's perhaps a different matter), or some such stuff that is mentioned in one of those papers that you get when you have just finished paying your first semester fees and filling out details for registration.

These days perhaps even blogs have attendance. I read this report which mentioned that thousands of blogs are floating like dead cadavers in the cold ether of cyberspace. Just when you thought there was something that could defy the rules of permanence, comes the revelation that even blogs come with a shelf life. You don't visit your e-temple often, and they label you an e-atheist. An infidel. And the punishment is to write an obituary about something you always held so close.

Your "dear diary..." amongst all the other equally dear ones, from intimate personal details to strange confessions to factual reportage... thousands of words trying to paint a picture, like an artist busily creating a sketch on the boulevard. Somebody would walk down, take a look, pass a comment, and walk away. And if they liked that one painting, they might actually search for you the next time they are on the boulevard. Probably refer your work to others who would then stop to admire, until you get famous. Until they take your name with awe, until the knowledge of your existence becomes a topic of "General Knowledge".

You would hate to see it die, won't you? Probably might be worth visiting the shrine once in a while. Who knows, what prayers might spew forth, and who knows, some of them might even be answered...