Life Lessons

A few days back I was reading Silverine's post about a self proclaimed embarassing confession of hers. The confession turned out to be that she was indeed a Himesh Reshammiya (HR) fan. I for one had never given the dude any attention and hindi songs were never a favorite in my circles, with only an occasional piece of art like 'bulla ki' or 'woh lamhe' breaking into our circle. All this changed last weekend with my little trip to Bangalore and Mumbai. The consequences were indeed dramatical.

So, me being selected by Wipro Technologies, had been presented with a red two paged medical checkup card along with some other documents sent by the company to our CGPU. No one had given it much of a thought, automatically assuming that we need not move a finger in that direction unless the company were to instruct us specifically about the process to be adopted to complete that dangerous looking card. Luckily some of our off-campus fresher colleagues knew better and took it upon themselves to enquire about the case, and after according to what they say 20-30 tries they got through to the concerned person and found out that the medical test indeed had a last date which was infact dangerously close. The word was spread and in turn evoked a spur of interest from fellow CETians resulting in an extension of the dates thankfully for another week. That brought me to the decision to club my medical test with a visit to Mumbai that my cousin Dina has been inviting me and another of my cousins Hari to.

The volvo ride to Bangalore was fairly uneventful, with me locking eyes intermittently with a brown eyed chick sitting across me being the only timepass that I could find. The ride also signalled the beginning of the movie fest that I was to be exposed to for the rest of the trip (here it was a funny malayalam flick starring Mukesh). Getting to Bangalore, I got the first taste of what was in store for me from an innocent looking auto driver. Since my cousin was not going to be free untill afternoon he talked with this auto driver dude and set me up for a 'Malayali' lodge about Rs 150 and his auto charge Rs 10. He also assured me that the Ranbaxy institute, where I was to have my medical test was just walking distance from there. As you can all imagine everything changed when we actually got there, with the rent turning out to be Rs 350 (and I needed the room for only a few hours) and the auto driver being very generous in asking "maybe 150-200 thannal mathi" for taking me there- about 200 mts from where we started. But I got over this initial jerk to the ride, thinking I should have known better than to trust my cousin in setting things up. After freshening up I started out on the "Walkable" distance to the Ranbaxy institute. So after certain instances involving a mixture of broken syllabels and sentences in malayalam, hindi and english, I got a general drift and confidently walked myself to the City Market. Here the bus conductors and other officials completely succeed in not helping me by producing non-commital sounds or shrugs or both. My luck got a break with a by stander explaining to me in surprisingly good english that I was to take the 111 bus. So I hopefully asked him whether the bus ride was necessary or whether I could make the "Walkable" distance by foot if I had enough time. He laughed and urged me on to a coming bus. The ride, as you can all guess took about half an hour, with my luck showing again with me finding malayali co-passengers showing me the remaining way to the institute.

After this it was a taxing effort on my navigational skills to get back to the point where I boarded the bus, because unlike Trivandrum, Kollam or Calicut etc, where one could quite easily find ones way, Bangalore was, like we learned in Town Planning classes, was roughly in the form of concentric circles. Anyway surprisingly without much effort I got back to the market, picked up my cousin and got back to my room unscathed. There ended the Bangalore story because the very same day at 3 pm we boarded a bus to Mumbai.

It is here that the major change in me took place. Like I have mentioned earlier I barely knew the guy named Himesh Reshammiya and just barely could recognise his hit songs. But the bus management I think took it upon themselves to change anyone who boarded their buses into a fan of HR by continously bombarding us with his songs every second that a movie was not playing. Understandably the tunes were etched into my newly found mushy conciousness. Another notable change was the one concerning my opinion of hindi movies, especially comedies. I could never stand hindi comedies and I had always stayed promptly away from them. But alas this time I could not run away and was forced to watch Salman Khan in "Maine Pyar Kyo Kiya". But I got over my initial skeptisism and found myself enjoying the obviously lame "challu" jokes and found the whole experience very much to my liking. They also showed flicks like Taxi 9211 and Rang De Basanti (which I never liked inspite of all the hype). The Mumbai stay was in itself unmemorable with us catching the peak of the rain action there, confining us to either a apartment room or to the confines of a rickety maruti800, except for a couple of visits to a Vashi Mall (Chicks were cool and they returned stares!!.. that was for the guys reading this)

The return trip was continous travel, with just one hour gap between connecting buses from Mumbai to Bangalore and Bangalore to Trivandrum. So the movie and HR fest continued with the same HR vcd playing or flicks like "Gangster" (beautifully taken, and lovely heroine), "36 China town" (which I enjoyed immensely) and completely forgettable "Pyare Mohan". In the end I stepped out onto homeground soil a changed man. Now hindi movies have a chance to be good ( my list includes now > Kaante, Dil chahta hai, 36 china and gangster), inspite of completely stupid movies like "Krishh" . AND I can stop myself from humming "Jhalak Dikhlajaaaaaaaaaaa, aaajja ajjja ajjja aaaaajaaa" all the time !!!!!