Tag Archive for 'diary'

ICU : The Most Depressing Place

Published on September 3, 2010 in Miscel. 0 Comments

Recently my grandfather had to be admitted to the ICU. His vitals weren’t stable and kidney was not functioning properly. Thankfully, he recovered and got discharged in 4 days. But those were 4 long days. Not only for him, but also for us. Trust me, you don’t want to be sitting in the corridor outside ICU chambers.

The hospital I am talking about is in BHU, Varanasi. You will find people from all sections of society there – from the rich to the poor. And it is the poor with whom I sympathize the most. There was this patient, a girl from a nearby village, who was pregnant. A few days ago her child died inside her womb. The family members did not care to get the dead body of the child out of the girl. Result – septic. When she couldn’t bear the pain, the family members got her to BHU and she was immediately admitted to the ICU. But even after spending 40K on her treatment, the doctors could not for certain assure the family members that she could be saved. They refused to pay for further treatment, and asked the doctor to let the girl die.

Occasionally we were allowed to go visit our grandfather (I know such things should not happen in ICU, but well). The ICU had 14 beds, each equipped with monitors to track the vitals. Green color coding tells you that everything is fine, yellow indicates borderline case and red is the call for immediate attention. Of the 14 patients, some 5 were in the yellow zone, and 2 in the red zone. In fact, once when my mother was feeding my grandfather, the doctor had to ask her to leave because the patient on the adjacent bed had his heart stop beating and needed the emergency procedures. The place is that scary.

On the fourth day, a patient was admitted in the morning, and by afternoon his dead body wheeled out. Every now and then a group of anxious family members would start weeping concerned for the life of their patient. Another neighbor of my grandfather had himself moved to a different section because his body had become too toxic and could have become a danger to the other patients. He died the same night. A man had been operated in the brain and collapsed into coma. For 3 weeks his wife and daughter had been coming to ICU.

All this definitely affects the patient too. The news of moving him out of ICU was a big relief for everybody. But I still think of all those people still waiting outside in the corridor, hoping their patient recovers as well, while fearing that death is too close to be ignored. I saw 3 dead bodies being removed in one day – ICU is the most depressing place I have yet been to.

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Tra-la-la-laa

Published on March 23, 2010 in Anu. 0 Comments

On my way back from work this evening, I was stuck in traffic on the Inner Ring Road. It was then that I heard a humming and distinct singing. Looking around for the source, I realised that it was the guy riding on a bike beside me singing some gult songs. And he made no efforts to keep the volume down.

I might have initially scoffed at the guy. But once the traffic got moving, I gave singing a try. Anyone who has heard me sing, with some background music, will testify that it’s a torture. Caring little for anyone listening to me, I started to sing loudly while riding the bike.

And I must accept, it was quite a pleasant feeling. It felt good. I am going to do this every day from now on. :D

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Anuvrat vs Anuvrat

Published on January 3, 2010 in Anu. 0 Comments

Warning: This is an extremely boring narration on Anuvrat. It is only me, me and me. So you might want to skip right over it. :)

The story of my life! I need not look into more than 4 years into my past to compare the boy I was and the guy I have come to be. I remember vaguely declaring to anybody who would care to listen, before going to IIT Kharagpur, that I shall come out as a man unchanged in habit and manners. Times Change, People Change – I know. Yet, there was this belief in me that I shall remain the same person that I had always been at school. I was happy then. I had just realized the then biggest dream of getting into an IIT. What else did I need? No reason to alter myself I thought.

And my first year friends will acknowledge the fact that I remained the same shy, introverted person throughout the first year. Slept at 10. Would keep my room clean. Cared a lot for my possessions. Avoid anything unfamiliar. Rather stay in the background than try to get noticed. This was Anuvrat Singh, JEE404, in the year 2005.

I was fortunate enough to make an amazing group of friends – Ketan, Naresh, Ritej, Akhilesh, Akshit, Rohit, Ved, DC, Srinath, Gyanendra. Each of them unique in a special way. They started influencing me. But did I know back then that they would completely overhaul my personality? No is the simple answer. I still missed my school friends a lot.

Then came the dreaded second year – The Orientation Period, as it is called. I was boarded at the Radha Krishnan Hall of Residence. This was the year I started becoming more confident of myself. I was learning to say No. There was this painting on the walls of my room. The caption said – What are you waiting for, Reveal Yourself. I made new friends this year in Ratno, Siddhartha, Raunaq, Shadab, Nitin and Arpan.

But I remained the honest introvert. In fact, also confused.

The third year came along. A few more people became important to me. Birinder Tiwana and his brother Birjodh. The two were the complete opposites of me. This was the year when all the people would be trying to land a foreign internship. And I did! I remember the date – 7th December (only because it coincides with the birthday of a friend) – when I received the mail. I was selected at EPFL!

And this was the point from which I never looked back again - or so I feel. It all happened so suddenly and magically. Time seems to have sped by swiftly since then. So many eventful days. I think this is when I started changing. I no longer missed my school friends. I completely got over them.

Arpit, Vinu and Varun became friends – we were all headed to EPFL. The 6th semester was spent planning the great vacation at Switzerland. Rohit too was accepted at a university in the same country. We got ourselves schengen visas. We were going to tour Europe!

And the three months at Switzerland was like some surreal dream. It was the first time I went shopping alone. I wasn’t afraid to be myself anymore. I could openly express my opinions. I was way more confident of myself than I had ever been. I was happy – a happy which was different from the happy after clearing the JEE. And I liked it. I wanted more of it. I wanted to be happy. I did not want to be bothered with future anymore. I wanted to live the present. This was the time I actually started dreaming. I wanted to live up my dreams.

Back at Kharagpur for the final year, I could feel my Swiss enthusiasm to have been carried over here as well. I was smiling like all the time. I had become overly energetic. Half the time I was jumping around in my room. I was happier than I had ever been in my lifetime. I was chatting with people more than I ever did – just so that you know, I hate socializing. I was spending a lot of time with my friends. Akshit’s careless attitude I liked, Naresh’s dedication to work I appreciated. We had lots of parties – like almost every other weekend.

I got back in touch with more than a couple of school friends – thanks orkut. I had a facebook account! I was starting to interact with people in public chats. I made a few online friends – people I have never met but have chatted to.

Come January and I had a job. Life couldn’t have been merrier. We bunked classes and went to a trip of Dehradun. We were white river rafting while our classmates were busy solving homework assignments. March and April was literally like the month of parties all around. This was Anuvrat Singh, o5CS1023, graduating in the year 2009.

Those two semesters completely changed the person I was. It’s like a feeling of being rejuvenated. I probably still am an introvert, but I make a sincere effort to interact with people. I try to influence people all around myself with my enthusiasm and excess energy. I don’t like to sit at home anymore. I want to hang out. Any place will do. Bike trips – bring it on. I am game for any adventurous activity you can come up with. It’s like I have discovered someone within me, someone totally different, and he wants to reveal himself.

This is why, of late, I have been feeling more at home with my friends at Bangalore than in Hyderabad. At home my activities are curbed. Also, at Hyderabad, I go back to being the old Anuvrat which I do not want to any more. Its like alter ego taking over me.

When at Bangalore, it is I who decides what to do with my time. I sometimes go to office at midnight. I sometimes go for coffee at 1 am. Sometimes, we are just making noise the whole night, watching movies or playing cards. Security guard calls on us to cut down the volume, but we don’t care. On more than a couple of occasions we have spent over 1K on just dinner! We are quite spontaneous in what we do – never planning ahead, just doing whatever pleases us.

And then I come to Hyderabad, I am with my parents – civilized and mannered. Then I go back to being a prick at Bangalore. Then once again I am at Hyderabad, where there are so few friends – all of them working, none of them has time to meet me during the weekdays. Then I am back at Bangalore, having a jolly good time with my flatmates on a Wednesday evening. Another weekend, I am in Hyderabad and spend my night surfing the net and doing nothing productive. I am now in Bangalore, working late night on a piece of code. I am at Hyderabad, bored and nothing to do. I am at Bangalore, all the friends just 10 minutes away, never alone, never bored and always happy.

I do not know what gets into me when I come back home. It’s like two people entwined into one, controlled by an automatic toggle switch which controls the dominant personality. But I want to get rid of the old me completely. People often stare into infinity and with a smile assert that school days had been the best time of their life. I am at loss at how to explain people that perhaps those years were the most boring ones that I have ever had. I love the friends I made back then, but I detest the person I was in school.

It’s become too long now. I just want to declare now that I have indeed changed a lot. I just know one thing now – I want to make all my dreams come true. No matter how unreasonable they are, I don’t care what I have to do for that, I don’t mind being a rebel, the society does not bother me any more. I am selfish now, and it is this passion of being happier than the happiest person I have ever met which drives me. And as always, I want to remind myself -

What good is money if I have no family and friends to spend the fortune on.

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To Bug Is Human, To Debug Divine

Published on April 1, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

Debugging is a pretty tiring job. More so if you do not exactly know where you have erred. I spent half the day today debugging my code. Hopefully, it does not have any more bugs.

A day earlier I thought I was done with my BTP coding. I tested the code for small inputs, and the results were as expected. Happy with my work, I wrote a script to let it run a few times on inputs generated following the poisson distribution. When I woke up the next day I was shocked to see the results. They were nothing like what I had imagined. The results had deviated highly from what was expected by theory. Damn! A day’s hard work gone waste.

I sat down to remove any bugs. To elp in the debugging process, I had generated 4 log files – log.xml, run.data, plot.data, miss.data. Poring over these log files and simultaneously running the gdb was a strenous work. I had no idea where the errors were being reported. The aberration becomes observable only after my code has executed for some 10,000 times. It was simply impossible to dry run the code for so long and zero-in on the bug.

I tried a smaller random input, hoping to catch the bug. Luckily enough, this data set produced the error. The deviation was not too obvious, but a hard look at the log files, and I could narrow down the error to a few functions in my code. However, to find the bug, I had to eventually dry run the code for this smaller data set. This took another hour.

All’s well that ends well. I have rectified the error. Basically, I was forgetting to reinitialize an important parameter on the occurance of a particular event. With that done I am hoping to get good results when I wake up tomorrow morning. A good night’s rest is what I deserve. *A pat on my back*. :)

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My Paranoia Self

Published on March 27, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments
I’ve always been this paranoid guy who never trusts the people he cannot see. It was the primary reason that I avoided the social networking sites and was reserved while chatting with people I hadn’t met in a long time. However, things changed the last year and I started opening up. I did the most foolish thing of publishing my contact information over online. Contact information includes my phone number and email id’s.
Due to my foolishness, some unknown person has managed to forward all his calls onto my cell phone, and now I am being annoyed by someone I do not know. Damn ! This is the second case of my foolishness, of my letting the guard down over the net. Never again shall this happen.
I have decided to once again revert back to my paranoia self – never trust a person you cannot see. I am removing all my contact information, setting up strict privacy filters and actually pruning the friend list. The whole operation might take a few days to complete as I’ll have to scan all the places where I might have left any information whatsoever. If you are a friend who knows me, then you’ll find some way of contacting me.
Phew ! Some work to do during the weekend.

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Case Of The Forwarded Calls

Published on March 27, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

An interesting event occured to me yesterday. I do not know if it is the sheer genius of the other person or an honest mistake on his part. Either way, I have had to deal with an angry sales person the whole evening. The whole affair is described below.

It all started in the evening. I returned back to my room after the evening snacks. As I sat down to work, my phone rang. An unknown number – +919334461925. I pick up the phone. The conversation was in hindi.

‘ello. Who’s this?

When will you return my money?

Excuse me, but may I know who am I talking to?

******, when will you return the money you owe me !

I suppose you have dialled a wrong number. Which number do you think you have dialled?

I got a call from you on this number, asking me to recharge the number +9198——– (I do not remember the other number) for an amount of Rs 3500, with your word to repay me today. When do you intend to pay me back.

I am sorry. I repeat once again, I think you have got the wrong number. I am not the guy you are looking for.

*******. I dialled your number +919002341426. This is the number you called me with. Now ****** tell me your address so that I can set you straight.

I hang up. But immediately the phone rings again. The same number. Damn, he redialled

Hello?

******. Why did you hang up. Afraid of telling me your address are you?

So eager for a fight are you, come on. I am in RK Hall of Residence. Wanna set me straight. Come here. I shall be waiting for you at the gate.

Who the **** do you think you are.

Afraid are we now, huh?

Pay back my money and I’ll let you go.

Dial the correct number first and you’ll get what you want. My number starts with 99, not 90.

Smart chap eh? Tell me, how did you tweak the connections of your mobile phone, that I dial your number on 90 and it goes to your phone at 99.

Am I expected to laugh at your joke, because believe me, I’m not in the mood for it.

I’ll complain to the police.

I’ll thank the gods for putting some sense into you. Please go on and do so.

I just want my money.

Can you talk properly first? ‘Coz I do not see this conversation heading anywhere.

[a few minutes silence]

When will you return back my money?

As I have already told you, you have got the wrong person. I am not the guy who asked you for a recharge. Please redial and check with the right person.

How can it be? I dialled the correct number.

May be a cross connection. You might perhaps want to try after a few hours.

Or a simpler solution is for you to return my money, ******.

Mind your language.

I hang up again. He called me again and again, but I let the phone ring.That was all for yesterday. In the morning today, I got another call. A different number – +916542325507. Again the guy was asking for someone else. Something is definitely wrong, I thought. I told him the same thing, that this is a different number and hung up. But something came back to my mind immediately. I thought I had seen an arrow mark on my screen beside the number of the caller. This never showed up before. Something is definitely wrong.

I went to my neighbours room, Rohit. I asked Rohit to call up the 90 number. The call was on my mobile ! But there was no sign of the arrow mark. Was it my mind playing tricks on me? Was I imagining things? All my screen showed was Rohit Calling. Unless …

I went to Dhangi’s room. Now Dhangi is not added in my contacts list. I made him call up the 90 number. And voila ! There it was, the arrow beside Dhangi’s number. And it immediately occured to me what the whole thing was.

The other person has set up call forwarding on his mobile. Whenever you try to call the 90 number, it gets forwarded to my mobile. All the time the sales person was dialling the correct number. I did not know what to do next. Dhangi suggested I call up the Airtel customer service and tell them.

I called up the Airtel customer service at 121, but I managed to get only one reply -

I am sorry sir. We cannot help you in this matter. Airtel is a service provider. All our customers are equally important to us.

Damn it fool, even after listening to the whole story can you not think out of the box and actually do something. I know you have been taught to blurt out the same response and you are doing a pretty good job as a bot. But don’t you see there could be something fishy here. I suspect a foul play. Can you not for a change use your brains and do justice to the money Airtel pays you.

I am sorry sir. We cannot help you in this matter. Airtel is a service provider. All our customers are equally important to us.

Oh my darling, this is India. Why do they even have call centers here, I wonder. The guy on the other side would have done a better service to the nation pulling a rickshaw. And to think that the Americans outsource all their work to be done by these damned creatures.

So be it. I am going to do nothing in this affair any more. If the sales person calls up again, I’ll tell him to go to the police. Let him fight for his money. Let Airtel value their customers so much that they annoy them. If only there was a way to block out all the forwarded calls.

So ends the Case Of The Forwarded Calls. I shall post any new developments below. But I do not think there will be any.

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Opening Up

Published on March 13, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

Its amazing how monitored ragging can positively effect your personality. In a few days you find yourself transformed into someone you always wnated to be but were hesitant. Instead on relying on the others, you now start to believe in yourself.

Being an engineering student and staying in an hostel, it is no secret that I have had to undergo ragging, or rather the politically correct term being used ‘orientation period‘ or OP. Fortunately though, we have the OP in our second year as compared to the first years else where. The first years are more vulnerable. But when you are in the second year, having already spent an year in the campus gives you a lot of confidence to face anything thrown at youself. Also to quell your fears regarding OP, let me mention that the OP is conducted in a very controlled manner and within restrictions. The sole purpose of OP is to gel with batchmates and instill a sense of belonging to a particular hostel.

But then this post is not about OP. Its more about how a few days of OP can change you forever.

Earlier I was this shy, introverted guy. I hardly used to talk to anyone. I remember back in the school days, I was to be interviewed by a lady from Times of India. She introduced herself and started by asking me to tell her something about myself. I went blank. After staring helplessly at people around myself, I replied, “Could you please be more specific. What do you want to know about me?” When asked to introduce myself, I couldn’t come up with anything.

Well, ask me the same question now, and I’ll go on for quite some time about who I am and what I like, well,  depending on how interested I feel you are. Moreover, earlier I used to avoid any contact with strangers, would leave a conversation hanging dead, and got lost touch with almost everyone from school.

All this changed after my second year. I am now trying to get back in touch with everyone. I do not feel the need to make new friends ‘coz I have too many good ones, but talking to a stranger does not bother me now. Back at home, I now socialize. Earlier I made it a point to avoid any party or social gathering, but now I am like bring-it-on, lets meet people.

The change though was slow to come about in my case. I still have this tendency of reverting back to the old habit of isolation. But there is always a constant effort on my behalf to change myself, to make myself more presentable. It is for the same reason that I love the sitcom Dexter. Its all about how you want people to look at you, and I’ll get there some day, sooner than later.

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I Wanna Run Away, Never Say Goodbye

Published on March 10, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

Exactly what I feel at the moment. Another day crawls to an end. I lie here in my room tired of boredom. Joblessness is the worst punishment you can dole out to any body.

It’s not as if I have no work to do. There are a lot of things I have to do, and frankly speaking, I am running out of time. If I continue postoponing, I’ll have to work extra furiously towards the end to ensure that the deadline is never crossed. But recently I have been distracted and not able to concentrate on my work. Coding is impossible at the moment, and so is thinking about any proofs. This in essense rules out BTP work!

Also I was trying to learn PERL by myself. But then once again there is this lack of motivation because I do not have any immediate use of the language. I am pretty happy with C and dont feel the need to know yet another language. So that is on hold for a while.

By any standards, the TV series have become boring and the movies left for me to watch demand high levels of concentration on my part which is currently not possible. I am more in the mood of some light comedy, yet none of those nonsense-watch-me-and-forget-me movies. Pirates of Caribbean describes exactly the kind of movie that I would want to watch. The last good movie that I liked was Bedtime Stories.

I need to brush up my Java once again. I received a mail from Fair Isaac confirming that Kashyap is going to interact with me during these days before I join FI. Although Navin says that C is an acceptable coding language, I shall try to switch to Java because bulk of the work done at FI has been using Java, and also so that I get a platform to master the language. However, I still think I would have preferred C++ to Java.

Perhaps the best thing for me is to go to sleep now. That way I might feel fresh after a good nights sleep and might actually feel like working tomorrow onwards. But please do not read much into these ’cause I have been feeling the same for the past 3 days !!

There’s this soccer match between Chelsea and Juventus, and also the fourth ODI between India and New Zealand airs day after. Good, something to look forwards to. I am eagerly waiting for the Formula 1 season to start.

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A Fun Bitwise

Published on February 9, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

So here it is, now that the Bitwise 2k9 is over, everyone feels so relieved and obviously happy. Everything went smoothly and happily. There was no hitch (well, compared to what are generally expected, we had the minimal of all the problems). And all the while when the contestants were busy cracking the questions, we were having fun in our own way.

Not just in India, but anywhere in the world, you’ll never find an event start on time. So why should we be an exception [:P].  Now since Bitwise is an international competition in which participants from all over the world take part, I put up a timer on the right hand sidebar, displaying the server time. This time would be used by the contestants to synchonise their watches. The event was to be begin at 1220 hours IST. And I was prepared, in the event of us getting delayed, to slightly change the server time – not that we finally needed it. The event started right on time. Actually we were all ready for the launch ten minutes earlier. The countdown began and just when the timer showed 1220 on our site, we released the problems.

The response was enormous !! The server was heavily overloaded. Many complaints started pouring in about the site not loading up. But in a matter of few anxious minutes, these complaints died down, and we took a sigh of relief.

Just when we were all getting into our new roles of maintaining the system and responding to all the queries, the first shock hit us ! No, it was no fault, no breakdown of system and certainly not of the server going offline. A team had actually solved a question, easiest though, and scored full. We couldn’t believe it. Naresh (Shenoy K) actually pulled out the file from the system, compiled it manually and checked with the test cases himself to make sure that the evaluator had not made an error. The problems team were bewildered. They wondered if their problems were not as good enough as they thought earlier. There were a few nervous smiles, trying to defend their claim that the questions are indeed though.

We convinced ourselves that this was just  one-off instance and that not all the teams will find the same question this easy to solve, that perhaps it was more by luck that talent that this team had cracked the first question in ten minutes. This we did only to be proved wrong in another quater of an hour. Submissions for the same question started pouring in and there were quite a good number of teams with full scores. We just kept our fingers crossed.

But then that did remain a one-off question. Apparently the second question had been changed just hours before the question. The original question was too tough to be solved in such short  time, and the problems team decided to put up a modified version which was easier, evident by the fact that the score was halved. The second question, the one to be solved first, carried just 75 marks, while the other questions were rated for 200s and 300s.

India vs. Sri Lanka cricket match was being aired the same time. We got busy watching the match while at the same time answering the doubts of the contestants. Ghoda (Birendar S Tiwana) had this brainwave the previous day of letting the teams add us on their gtalk id and contacting us over the IM in case of any doubts. The idea was a hit considering the number of queries I had to answer. I was asked all sort of things – from being pestered for hints, to suggestions that the questions were too tough to be solved by a final year student of engineering, to being told of that the sample cases we provided were wrong !

There were a few highlights of chatting that I would like to mention. A girl came online – nita..sharma.niit (obviously name changed to protect identity). She mentioned that the Enigma quiz was a great idea, and that she was enjoying it. Immediately Tharki (Arpit Kumar) got working. He told her that the whole of enigma was his brainchild (he mentioned it was of Arpit’s as a third person), and proceeded to give her his email id so that she could contact him to thank him personally. And she did !!! Her next message was – thanks for the id. I have added him on  GTalk. Tharki left the station and returned to his computer to attend to more pressing business [:P]. Apparently they have become good friends.

We had lots of fun answering the queries and chatting away. We dealt sternly with a few guys, having to tell them that we provide no hints and loved talking to a few who challenged our problem makers – a few of them really made Sudip (Roy) and co. ponder over the boundary conditions. Only a minor changes were made to one or two questions.

Aritro (Aritra Sen) was the server admin making all the changes to the webpages. Tension clearly showed when he occasionally lashed out at anybody suggesting he was slow in updating the  webpage (which he was not). Mallu Da (Vinu Rajshekhar) was the busy man firing away sql queries when we had to sometimes manually check if the file submitted contained malicious code. Naresh and Mallu were our goto guys when in doubt. Akshit (Sharma) and KT (Kaustabh Tripathi) ensured that none of us were hungry. They arranged for snacks and lunch, half of which they ate themselves. Shashi (Narayan) took charge of the feedback. Ghoda was the responsible person, always reminding us that we should not toy/abuse/insult/behave irresponsibly with people while chatting, that we should seriously answer their queries and never mislead them – this suggestion was too hard to follow. Karishma (Kapadia), Nisha (Kiran) and Chuski (Varun Sharma) were there as well, taking rounds in helping everybody out. The problem team members Anvesh (Komuravelli), Ashish (V), Bhuyan (Pramit K), Sumeet (Singal), Ruteesh (K) were obviously present to help us answer the queries.

In all, it was a great day. Everyone was tired by the end. I actually dozed off six hours after the start of the competition. Arindam (Sharma) had come in the evening afer his GATE exam. It was one of the best days of my stay in Kharagpur. Not having slept for almost 40 hours, I bid them goodbye and left for my room.

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A Forgettable Train Journey

Published on February 3, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments
Kharagpur's Railway Station

Kharagpur's Railway Station

Well, I had taken a break from kgp for the last week of January and had been to Hyderabad. One of the reason was that I had an eye checkup scheduled for the 30th of January, but then also I did not want to be here for Spring Fest. The days spent at home were the typical ones, mostly sleeping and eating. Finally it was the time to return back home – back to kgp, where I belong.

With the airbag inside the car, and everyone ready, we set off to the station. Dad started a conversation on the new railway coaches that have been introduced recently, the ones which have 9 seats in a group instead of the usual 8. He was narrating his experience and his opinion was that these coaches should be removed and the railways should revert back to the 8 seats per group coaches. I got drawn into a debate suggesting these new coaches are meant to accomodate more passengers, which is good considering the number of people travelling these days. As usual we never reached a conclusion, but he ended saying I will understand the troubles only after facing them.

He couldn’t have been more true. Unfortunately, I was alotted a seat in one of these coaches, and it was then that I realised how crowded the place looked. There was no room to fit the baggage, and the seats somehow appeared over-crowded. People who had come in groups were unhappy as the new seating arrangement meant that they were divided. Everyone was complainig while also trying to get seats exchanged.

As if this was not enough, I was seated amidst 8 retired bongs ! All of them old people, and they started chattering in bangali the moment the train started. There was only one thing left for me to do – plug in my discman, pick up my rubik’s cube and pretend I did not exist !

This almost sums up my whole train journey, except that the next morning a twist was introduced into the play. A small kid, maybe 2 or 3 yrs of age, came by and looked earnestly at my cube. I tried striking up a conversation with him. But he wouldn’t come nearer unless I give him the cube, and he wouldn’t stay if he got the cube. He made those cute convincing faces that kids make to get their work done. I had to part with the cube. Now with the cube gone, I was left with nothing to do and almost 4 hours to spend.

Luckily the train was not late and I got off before I could go mad sitting there all alone by myself. Truly a forgettable trian journey it was, the last one I hope it was from Secunderabad to Kharagpur.

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