Of Life and Love

There falls on the scenic train route to Guwahati, a barrage on a river. The Farakka Barrage is a famous sluice gate system but then there are so many barrages on the swirling rivers of India flowing to feed man’s ever gaping mouth. Such barrages are the symbols of ugly technology intruding into the soft domain of nature, like plastic and metal tubes sticking into a newborn baby suffering from disease. And yet how can we call them ugly? They serve many, they irrigate so much land, and they make so many farmers postpone their suicide for another season. In any and every way we use the rivers, they bestow the gift of life, their own slow death notwithstanding. Let others discuss (and hopefully solve) this while I tell you why this barrage in particular is the most famous one in India. This probably is the only barrage in India where a train track passes over it, and not only that but trains actually run on that track. And this is the very barrage that has managed to remain in the ey...

The train was to arrive around 6 am and the horde of XLers was gathering on the platform at Sealdah station. Most of us had converged from Howrah but a few were camped in Calcutta and were to join us here. The opportunity was ripe for the more thoughtful and prudent ones to begin their morning brushing and face wash and soon the platform water sinks were captured by a throng of XLers buzzing around the bank of sinks like a bunch of thirsty bees crowding around dripping water taps in summer. And boy we stung each other when the right to a tap was attacked! Manners are strange feelings. They need a cue, a reinforcement. Being mannered sometimes needs a leader who can remind that they need to be kept even when adversity strikes. And well, like in all other things that are influence driven, there are the early adapters, the late adapters and the laggards, all true to their species and never showing disloyalty to their breed. The compartment was duly captured; the couple of outsider...

When you go chasing your dream of a high flying corporate job in a b-school in India, you are asked to be prepared to handle the role, the life and the stress. 12-14 hour workdays, incessant parade of class presentations, piling project work, pending research work, surprise quizzes and the regular grind-mill of lectures mercilessly running into Saturdays and Sundays, fusing the torrid weeks and the weekends into one painful breathless whole. But all of this most of us know. What those of you, who look at this life of a b-school student from the outside can’t see is that we miss on a lot of other things in life. Things like freedom to roll on where our heart would take us, to walk on grass, to gaze on flowery landscapes, to splash in rivers, to feel the wind under a cloudy sky, to feel exhilarated by nothing but nature. We miss the use of our unbounded spirit and the absolutely liberating pure pleasure of driving on snaky mountain roads in a chilly mountain country under puffs of...

This trip happened in September of 2005 and I am pleased to say that being the official travelogue writer of this trip, it is finally now that I am discharging my duty. The ten or so part blog series I plan to write shall be completed if the super-blogger, who has already written all that we would ever blog about, keeps his blessings showered on me and keeps my mind’s writing bug alive and kicking and busy scribbling. And this series I dedicate to my enthusiastic Shillong group, my batchmates from XL who made this wonderful trip happen. Special thanks to Chief Abhinav Anand who always diplomatically reminded me of my travelogue writer duties and to one other person who left me alone for 2-3 days to make me turn to my blog and made the commencement of this series possible. Hats off to my rustic, adventurous group and hats off to the Shillong trip!

I love dreaming! Ok, lots of us do that. I know. And it is the one thing that perhaps we social animals are capable of doing which other animals can’t. Rest all we do is easily copied; in fact it happens regularly in both directions. Anyways, my point was that I love to dream, but while earlier it used to be a nice traditional dream sequence punctuating my worriless slumber, of late (I mean in the last few years) I have taken to the more bizarre and shameless version of dreaming: the open-eyed day dream! It’s like this. My theory on dreams was that whenever you get up and remember a dream from the sleep, it usually is the dream that got broken when you got up. Most of the dreams that get over properly you never remember. But you might ask, how do I know they exist at all if we forget them? Valid…very valid! You have been paying attention. Let me explain. When you get up and remember a dream, you usually find a storyline, however bizarre, creeping through the whole dream. And the...

I had read in many novels of the classical genre that characters spent their time and sometimes their nights on the riverbanks and even on rivers in their boats. In tales such as the Great Expectations, in Tom Sawyer, in detective stories of Hardy Boys and then in many others, I have had the vicarious pleasure of taking part in all sorts of adventures on many mighty rivers and their banks. And so when out-of-the-blue, life decided to treat me to something special, I could hardly believe it to be true! Just to put your cross-hairs on the target, I’ll mention that I’ve done my B.Tech from IT-BHU, in Varanasi and have since then been busy finishing MBA. The post MBA vacations are a good time, as seniors say, for a final goodbye to the life as we know it till now. So when a friend from BHU turned up at my house and proposed to make a one day overnight stay tour to the holy city and to BHU, I agreed without thinking. To tell you some more truth, I was amazingly vella (a term used in m...

I am on a boat bobbing in the waves of Ganga at Dashashwamedha Ghat, Varanasi. The Ganga Aarti is about to begin. Come, join me in having a look from this comfortable spot. There is a long line of steps that lead into the Ganga and behind them stand 7 cement pedestals where stand 7 priests draped in flowing silk of red and yellow hues. They have an impressive array of devotional material piled in front of them on the concrete pedestals. Each one lifts one artifact after another and performs the motions of an aarti in perfect unison and rythmn. The music flows from a wooden bed behind this line of priests where the bhajan singers sit. And behind them is gathered, in great strength, Banaras! A crowd of all ages and nationalities, bathed in powerful lights, stands in absolute devotion and watches in awe each motion of the priest’s hand as the flames of aarti in their hands billow and shake in the wind that comes from the Ganga. The bells toll continuously, pulled by members of th...