The Road goes ever on and on #1

The Road goes ever on and on

I would have to thank Bill Bryson personally for without him this write-up would have never been possible, although I do not know him.

1. Madras

As I sit back thinking on how a travelogue should be structured; I am faced with a very important crisis which I am usually not bothered with- to whom this writing should proceed and how useful they might find it.
For the first time in my life I set out to do something which someone other than the wombats(who can never read) find it useful and believe me, writing a travelogue is just quite as easy as writing nonsense; people in the days to come might find both the same.

I am not a traveler but I should say I have been a tourist or person visiting relatives in various cities, but travel has always excited me and people should necessarily understand the difference between travel and tourism both being completely different the only thing common is that both start with the alphabet t.

My trip would take me to the southern city of Trichy for a cultural event and like all other things in my life; the preparations were done in haste. Truthfully speaking I was very much looking forward to it but two divine interventions called laziness and college delayed my preparations, the latter also delayed my schedule and I had to leave a day later than the originally decided day due to a thing which I am remotely connected called practicals.
I have never enjoyed anything in life which basically deals with drawing four line borders with black pen and two underlines in blue ink and flowers at each corner to please the examining officer and needless to say I learnt very little but like all the other academic activities I did it with a fair share of grumbling, surprisingly the experiment which was concerned about the working of a transformer in different conditions interested me and so I played around me with the circuits which I would avoid otherwise. This I consider as one of the reasons for my tired nature for the rest of the day, then I slept for the rest of the day which I am not supposed to do and the classes continued, the thought of the journey ahead shone like a light at the end of the tunnel somehow the tunnel seemed to extend forever as my college made plans to work for the whole of the weekend and have classes on Sunday-‘ridiculous’ my pig brain said, another villainous part of it schemed my absence on that very day, finally something made me feel happy- I would not attend classes for the next two days and have three days as holidays, the very thought made me come front to the first bench for the math hour; I even made an attempt at solving two dimensional heat equations.

Classes for the day ended as I made my movement to the buses; I was finally going home. The books in my bag (which was predominantly occupied by ‘From Russia with Love’ by Ian Fleming which had a good retro feel to it and pleasurably had the picture of a Russian woman in a ‘not so often seen pose’ and ‘The moor’s last sigh’ by Salman Rushdie a book I am yet to understand and will require all of my cerebral capacity)

Reading through one of the sleazy massage sequences in ‘From Russia with love’ (which occurs in the very early pages of the book –all those James Bond fans out there) I went into the fantasizing mode where I imagined I was (who else) Bond and the operation involved me rescuing a beautiful Russian actress from an oil tanker, the route would be from under the sea while we finally came out of the water(me in swimming trunks showcasing a six-pack abs contrary to all that flab I have in real life and the actress would undress into a smaller version of a bikini, maybe that’s how they celebrate summer up in Russia). The oil tanker would later explode and the Bond theme orchestrated by John Barry played in the background. After all this was imagination and anything could happen, a co-passenger commented that he had never seen me go through my course book with such interest, the boy remembered me of my father’s daily monologue.
I wowed to finish the Bond novel by next week as I comfortably ignored the literary Rushdie as I reached home.

My mind for the next one hour focused on packing, finally I was leaving home.

Satyeki

My First Quiz

I had been thinking about the things i should be writing in this particular blog but i couldn't find much to write about in the past few days except of one bad quiz which i did for QFI last Sunday.

Believe me it was bad and from the time 'Indian bank' came up as the first slide i realized there were going to be more problems;as you should be knowing a QFI quiz does really demand a certain amount of preparation which was lacking , all i had was a shoddy power-point presentation which insisted on giving the answers before the questions( which i can now fairly say is a tribute to the mind of Derek O Brien who used to conduct these types of rounds at my school) and i could sense the irritation of those who had arrived at P.S.Senior.
I didn't edit my work properly which gave rise to few more errors and my whole quiz of X,Y,A,B,M,N,I was irksome and due to lack of time i had merely pasted random articles from Wiki which didn't quite serve the purpose.
The people probably would have thought it a waste of time, if(ever again in my life i am to do a quiz) i promise a better show.

And i finally thank the members of QFI for being patient of all my ignorance and for not throwing me out. yes this will remain in memory as one bad quiz done.

Satyeki

Oh Blue Bird!

The Daily Circus is a newspaper; I thought everyone knew that. I had grown reading the daily circus (later in my life I learn that only our family preferred The Daily Circus to The Daily Gooseberry)

I write in shame that we live in a world that has little knowledge of a quality organ of information, I’m not saying anything about The Daily Gooseberry; I just say that it doesn’t deserve to be the leading daily I would even accept The Weekly Vulture which had a special column on the changing geology of the earth but not the Daily Gooseberry, something in the Gooseberry made me feel sick.

I made my way to The Society on one Sunday afternoon, I carried with me the anguish and sense of failure I had had always on Sunday afternoons, especially when I read the Sunday Gooseberry, they had beaten me to one more news break. Not that my editor bothered much about deadlines we were still covering Watergate but there was always a personal loss and my fellow reporters always got the best of me, they even called leading celebrities by their nickname, I could saw now that with certain degree of frankness that I was quite jealous of these people.

The Society had always existed, and it always changed. Terry Idle was sitting on a wooden bench in one of the corners. Terry Idle was the only one whom I knew in the society, the poet was sitting looking up at the sky and then he began to sing

“Oh how high you fly blue bird
How about a small word
It would as white as curd
What do you say blue bird?”

There was no bird of course even if there had been it would cared much, but I thought it was quite a good poem, I could appreciate it even in one of sad moods.
Words come naturally to Idle, words just flow into his head out of his mouth like a…like a gush of industrial waste into the river. No I don’t think that was a good imagery.

“Terry why don’t you send these things to the press they might put out collections of poems?”

He noticed me for the first time that evening

“Oh how are you mister scribe?
You may have heard of the bribe
It’s not good for our tribe
And I do not like what you prescribe”

Terry published only when he thought that it was utmost necessary for instance for the next meal; and surprisingly he would get his money out of nowhere, seeing my distress Terry went into one his creative outbursts which I will write in the days to come, maybe I am quite dim or the whole concept of intellect itself is very relative.

Satyeki

A SORT OF DARKNESS

Lazeroid is a portmanteau word; not that it helps in the further proceedings of this space story, but I will not tell you what two words make up the Lazeroid as it is not possible to write what Lazeroid are physically made so why bother of what they are composed of verbally.

But that was a fact that I did come across during my preparations for the examinations held by Society of International Literary Politics (SLIP, yes I know it should have been SILP but since the founder was slightly dyslexic SLIP stuck on). SLIP is one old organization or so they tell me at the regional office while I wait among millions who like me want to be recognized as the member of SLIP.

I don’t know how old SLIP is, but in one of those heavy leather bound ledger tucked away into one of the corner rooms of the SLIP building New New York (NNY, a completely new city built some miles from NY, the maps look very similar and so do the tourist spots which confused millions of people visiting NNY, but people still acknowledge the presence of these two sister cities) I found GOD as one of the permanent members of SLIP.

Since God is the oldest thing ever to have known to man apart from the wheel and fire, God still becomes the most controversial and exciting thing to have been accepted (say some) or discovered (say others) but the followers of these two theories suffered a major shot when they came to know about this; many argue that the word GOD could have been an addition by one of the pious founding members of SLIP but the idea was immediately rejected as there were no pious founding members.

The examinations held by the SLIP foundation were heavily criticized by The Daily Circus a newspaper I work with; not that it is much of a lucrative career but it does pass the time. Time again is a difficult concept to explain, the other day while we at the SLIP preparations club meeting decided to have time as the theme of debate and all of us learned men and heavily learned women could not give quite a comprehensive picture about the whole thing called time, so we said ‘Time’s up Gentlemen; pick up your hats and we have time to pass’. Though the above anecdote might not be funny for all those who enjoy reading rubbish things on the internet but for a lady living in the inner depths of the African jungle wrote to me quite formally stating that she was rolling over the only table she had at her native home in Zimbabwe and that she could never write without staggering as she always remembered the incident. Below the lady also stated that she very well knew the concept of time and had seen God in his earlier years and other things which would help us explain the mystery of the lazeroids.

The letter changed my life forever and I set out for what was once called the Dark Continent; along with me came two funny looking gentlemen and the daughter of one of them; whose daughter they would not say and I never dared to ask because one of them had mastered the art of throwing daggers on fellow passengers, the girl insisted on bringing a rare duck billed platypus but both the funny looking men refused so she had to bring a blue dolphin instead which was later let into the oceans.

And now begins the journey of our lifetime.

Unfortunately….to continue.

Satyeki