Around the world in 80 ways...

Day before yesterday was quite an eye-opener of sorts.
After a sleepy early morning (read midnight, or alternatively 4 AM precisely) drive in appa's new car(yeah!! we now own a car all to ourselves, a brand new second hand maruti 800, bought for a price that screams "Beat me!", at 60K flat...), all the way down to Chennai airport, the next leg was a 2 hour Air Deccan flight to mumbai. The flight was spent in blissless sleep, the attractive Lalita notwithstanding. The airhostess is the best thing that happened to me on any form of indian transport, but even she couldn't disturb my dawndreams. The aviatophobiac in me was regularly woken up rudely by a combination of the roughness of the rainclouds and the obvious struggle of the aircraft to cope though... When we touched down, Mumbai was raining, as it recently has been, almost like as if it had a patent to rain...

An auto next, from the airport to the Dadar railway station, where we had a connecting train to ahmedabad later in the day. With his meter working perfectly, we must hav switched off all our meters inside, for we ended up paying the 100 that he asked us for a meter that read 62, in spite of dropping us off halfway to the station, giving some reason in Hindi on both counts... we decided to let these pass, in spite of the clear case of fraud. Amen!

Taxi for the rest of the distance to Dadar, another 50 bucks down the puddles...
Mumbai's suburban trains suck. or the people do. Either way, it is a guarantee that any given train journey on a mumbai local train would culminate in at least one of heartburn, a dislocation of the spinal chord, a fracture of the hindlimbs, mutilation of the mucus membranes or, at best, a victorious wounded warrior.

The morning onward trip to churchgate was nowhere near the limits though, and we (AC and Momo being the other 2) made it in serene silence, and ended up spending the best part of the next 2 hours on platform no.2, churchgate station, solving 2 classic crosswords, 1 bollywood crossword, sudoku and Jumble, all in that solitary page among SIXTY SEVEN other pages of uselessness of Mumbai Mid-day..

After a pizza lunch with Chandru joining us, the Gateway of India was where we headed to, though we decided on a ferry to the Elephanta caves the moment we got to the gateway, which did not inspire any awe. The rain had stopped, as if under orders, and we set off on our voyage to elephanta, armed with copies of Animal farm and Jonathan livingston seagull. With the estimated travel time slowly growing from 45 mins to double the duration, the caves seemed to go farther and farther. The decision was made in quick time, and the moment we docked at the pier, we jumped across to the nearest return boat, and in our effort to make the cyclic trip worth its 480 bucks, we ended up having a ball on the return journey, digesting such interesting sights as starving sea birds, static fishing boats, floating thermocole on water, ocean currents, the color of the water and so forth, doing a leonardo (sans the Kate) on the boat rails, humming the Jurassic park theme.. So much for elephanta..

The return trip to Dadar by train has to be the highlight of the day though. The headcount was insane. Defying all laws and logic, I still cant swallow the fact that one compartment could have held that many heads, and double that many legs. I was standing, incredibly, at something like 45 deg to the horizontal, and holding on to nothing at all.. Gravity, trigonometry, out the window! If men could reproduce by themselves and if suddenly all men in that lil box were to be stripped off their clothing, that single compartment could have yielded upto 4 dozen babies i tell u... With one hand on my purse and other other holding my laptop way above my head, i had to literally wrench my way inch by inch across to the exit, taking an unprecedented 3+ minutes to cover that distance of one meagre metre.. Momo almost slipped under the tracks in the process of getting out, but his half-smile from behind those tortured spectacles said it all...

Bus journey next, to chandru's house, accompanied by a pained tamilian soul who seemed to take pride in the fact that he had survived so many train-trials to finally get home every evening to lie "nacked" under his bedroom fan..

Delightful dinner at chandru's later, we headed back to Dadar and our train to Ahmedabad.. It was raining buckets, and boy, i was glad to get out of Mumbai.. The boyfriend conversation with Mimi and Batti was enlightening to say the least.. Michael madhana kama rajan on the train, in our laptop..

Life here at ahmedabad hasnt changed. We arrived yesterday, and classes started today, with readings totalling to 120 pages in economics, 65 pages in marketing and a case preparation in Quants...As AC would say, FISH!