Around South india in 6 days..

Blog entry #1 on my backup blog...

Returned yesterday from a week-long tour of mumbai, hyderabad and bangalore... had a couple of interviews, at mumbai and bangalore, and hyderabad had to fit in coz J wanted to squeeze in one day at the office..

For no reason, the tension i felt when i was at Central waiting for my train to leave was immense. Next mission was to find out who would be my cabinmates, and though no one actually got in at chennai apart from the usual 2 paattees who always find me somehow, i found a rather encouraging "Ujwala.. F 23" on the list of passengers on the seat next to me. What i failed to notice was the "Manish M 25" which loyally - and menacingly - accompanied lil ujju.. Never said a word to either of them for the entire trip, with only the paattees offering me some fruit and nuts... Some things never change...

And irrespective of all the "soceital upliftment" that, say, Ranga's blog talks about, i happened to witness one of a different kind. In more senses than one, the eunuchs on the mumbai train line HAVE to be the worst thing to have happened to the indian railways.. Probably one of the reasons for my being tense b4 i got on to the train, i was alone, innocently reading Business world, when suddenly i feel a rather coarse hand on my cheeks.. Lookin up, there he/she was...Fumbling in my pockets to pick up all i could find, i managed to hold out 3 Rs and 50 ps... He/she refused to take it flat, and something told me i had to send her off soon. With no regret watsover, i handed out a 10 rupee note, stretchin my hand as far as it wud go.. I knew though i hadnt seen the end of the eunuchs, and the next morning, when ujju and manish were cuddling away to glory when i was watchin from the safe realms of a rather uncomfy upper berth, there he/she came again.. and this time manish decided to play the quintessential hero in front of his lady love, and got into this verbal battle with he/she.. Of course, he/she wanted nothing but some quick money, and so there she was.. thank god i was in the upper berth and didnt see anything. but manish did i guess.. when she staged the upliftment ordeal, holding up the sari long enuff for him to see watever it was... What could be more gross? Sure enough, the lovebirds never said a word to each other for the next 15 minutes, stunned into silence.

Mumbai, Feb 5-6

J was there at the station, and after some kinda lunch, we hiked off on our own around matunga, and after buying roadside-sale editions of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, and Straight from the Gut by jack welsh, we settled down in some kinda park and drilled ourselves thro a mock interview, which was quite a revelation actually.. I, at least, found that i was really bad..
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Autorickshaws in mumbai have this really cranky meter system, starting with 0-1-0-0 on their display, and then the 'tens' digit changing everytime.. like, 0100 and then 0110 and 0120 and the like... So we were confused as hell when we seemed to have travelled miles and the meter showed 0790, and then we were given the gyaan that we had to multiply the meter reading by 10, making it 79 bucks, and for whatever weird reason had to subtract 1 rupee off it, givin him 78 bucks finally. In Chennai, the driver would have asked - at the very beginning - for 150 bucks and finally would have agreed to 110 or so... SEVENTY EIGHT???? @#$&*$@%.. ( As an aside, the interview at SP Jain went off ok.. couldnt gauge how we did, though... Fingers crossed..)

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The bus trip to Hyderabad in a volvo video coach was top-of-the-draw funny. All that talk about Arun neelakantan and arun kumaran and their oft repeated pearls of wisdom..lol... some mithun chakraborthy movie playing, with amisha patel occasionally turning some heads... the next morning was THA BEST.. listenin to music - kaadhal and swades - one ear each on that dangerous walkman of J's.. AWESOME feel.. easily one of the highlights of the odyssey...
Once in Hyd, J trooped off to tcs, and i settled for self-made maggi (realised how much i missed it since singapore), and settled down on that 3-feet couch to watch "main madhuri dixit bannaa chaahti hoon".. for once though, even antara mali's jhatkas couldnt keep me awake..dead tired.. RR woke me up, and then i headed off to J's office, clinging on for dear life in one of those overloaded share-autos... Englishing our way with chaitra was surprisingly and shockingly embarrassing.. Kakatiya mess was where we had dinner... decent food for famished souls..
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Come bangalore, and COOL it was, literally! freezing in the early morning cold, J and I had no clue where we were, and got taken for a ride by come autowallah who had a meter that went to 29 from 18 and from 38 to 49.. Found him out thro some skilful sleuthing, and found makki's place after quite a while..
Must mention here that I LOVE makki's routine there.. breakfast at a sapthagiri-ish place, rock bottom cheap.. brilliant start to any day, and then some other mess for lunch.. PROPER tamil food.. and the sandwich-chikku milk shake place also rocks big time.. best chikku mil shake ever produced..
Found IIM-B after an eternity, with YET another autowallah takin us to IBM instead... God save us.. Autos and us never got along..
Steppin into IIM-B for the first time, i started singing the "Ae... he..." bit of Udit's from yeh thaaraa.. Awesome feel...J did well in his gd/pi, and we headed off to IISC for an evening with Koushik Rajan, who is busy rejecting job offers of 6 lakhs per annum, waitin for his PhD admits from the US... and as is the usual, we could not have reached the bus stand any later for J to leave back to hyd..J had to endure a substantial quantity of absolutely insulting obsceneties from the fuming conductor for having been made to wait...
BLACK was where makki and i went to next.. night show.. am not writin about that movie here. will hav to write on it separately....
Returning from black, we first paid 50 bucks to some policeman for some wrong driving.. and jus when i was culling the bangalore police for being just as bad as their chennai counterparts, along came these 2 other policemen who stopped us and asked us to blow into their mouths, and simply refused to let us go without proper documents.. no bribing either.. had to wake up makki's roommate - Bull - at precisely 0000 HRS and poor fellaa.. he came to the place promptly with all the docs and we were free.. one helluva day...

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next day, feb 9, was my MDI GD/PI... went alright.. though i got the feeling they had decided to reject me even before the interview went past 2 mins... Fingers crossed...
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Dinner with makki and chetna.. went to her place, and had this uphill walk to the pizza place... realised i had been missing pizza too, although the one i ate there was hardly half as good as its singaporean cousins. ;-)
Some feel-good fone conversations at the bus stand and then i was on the 200 Rs. miracle bus back to chennai.. tired was not the word... that the bus took an atrocious TWELVE hours to get me to chennai was quite another thing...

WWHHEEEWW!!!
Alright, that blog entry just happened.. If u didnt read thro all of that, i do NOT blame you...

update : I got an offer of admission from MDI.. :-) Better than wat i had bargained for..