The Road 2

2. Egmore Railway Station


I was tired, as I did say before and couldn’t continue my supposed travelogue beyond the extremely tiring journey from college to home and so now that time has come again.

The object of my travel would be the National Institute of Trichy formerly known as the Regional Engineering College, as a man who is actively involved in certain areas of art I decided that I would be deserving enough to take part in their cultural event so easily titled Festember and yes you don’t have to ask, it does happen in the month of September it would be pointless to call it Festuary or Festuly (but festuary rhymes with estuary and will surely made use of in one of me later poems about this universe)

As all plans go wrong, this one also did, my original plan was to board a train a day earlier with my usual traveling but I started a day late thereby missing the event I was most looking out for-the lone wolf quiz. Not that I am the winning sort but the lone wolf quiz do test your individual thinking capacity.

I had taken lone wolf quizzes before, the most popular one being the IIT lone wolf quiz, the truth is that I enjoyed doing it but did not progress and progress is not a thing that I would care for; looking back into my life progress has been minimum and the pink cards called ‘progress cards’ I would receive till my primary only showed the opposite of the word in question. Not that I was too dumb or maybe I was it is to the information of the readers that the color of the progress card was changed to green when I ‘progressed’ to higher classes

Progressing to Egmore, I take a late evening train out of Mambalam looking out for familiar faces to accompany during an uneventful journey which is to follow, local trains in Chennai aren’t much crowded but Murphy’s law always works perfect for me...I being the quintessential negative person-it was crowded.
A man whose mouth was full of something I do not wish to describe made an effort in starting a conversation with me, I being the innocent listener was afraid that he would mistake me for one of the railway corners which are so helpfully painted red by people like the man who I was talking to.
He talked so much-topics ranged from the population density of the train to the habitat of the koala bear. I wished that Egmore station was nearer, later I reflected that the only word I had uttered during this conversation was a polite ‘Hmm’. Not that the man was intolerable or something I develop something of this sort called instinctive dislike to people I don’t know why but it something of an inherent quality I seem to posses like Harry Potter’s scar which aches when the old bad man is around.
Man with red thing in your mouth- if you are reading this I am sorry I really used you in getting this travelogue forward and hope we had a great conversation.

I reached Egmore way before any train in my direction would leave, so I took the lower bridge tapping my brain to find the bookstore on Egmore railway station, I finally find true to it’s pace when I saw some years back-The Ramakrishna Mission Bookstore.
I am not ashamed to agree that I quite a religious man, I find so many are ashamed at accepting such a fundamental thing- the impulsive book buyer that I am( I nearly spend all my father’s salary buying second hand books and we starve for the rest of the month)
I got one book on meditation by Swami Vivekananda himself which I am yet to read I didn’t know why I bought it but I did.
I spent rest of the fruitful moments reading through other books till the shopkeeper shooed me away like a rabid dog, then my friend arrived and we bought unreserved tickets to Srirangam.

The railway station, one of the oldest in the country , it would not be untrue that the golden age of the southern railways began at Egmore and I did like strolling through old buildings.
Till late eleven o clock we were hopping from one platform to another looking at heroines on movie poster and flashy magazine covers and having two rounds of caffeine.
I even tried singing “Hello I Love you ….won’t you tell me your name” which caused serious panic on platform nine and no quarters people began running in opposite directions and caused a minor stampede which was reported on the 17th page of the Times of India the next day, over all another day until the train arrived as usual late.


Satyeki

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