bus ride....

I live an adventure everyday. And I don’t mean it in the romantic, ‘my life’s great!’ kinda way at all. The thought occurred to me while commuting to my home from college in a bus with people bursting out through its doors and windows. Hanging from the rails at the door, almost fainting due to the congestion and suffocation inside ; Holding on to dear life while the driver showed off the precision of his brakes (ouch! That really hurt) and his skills at overtaking speeding buses which , unlike our bus, didn’t have the entire population of Kochi inside them.

you think you know who you are but you will be surprised at how many more times selfish, snobbish and cheaper you are until you’ve traveled in one of the ‘private’ buses in the rush hours. Boy, won’t that be revelation! There I was , this evening, waiting for the bus to come take me home. Feeling good about myself. Confident, socially conscious, principled young woman that I am. And then came the bus. It stops reluctantly a mile away from the bus stop. I forget my sophisticated airs and run to the ramshackle vehicle. Many older, hardened ‘chechis’ push and shove to get in first. I wait patiently with an unsteady look on my face. There’s no seat in there! Where are you people rushing to?!. "Get in there fast", the bus conductor growled and I jumped in. the bus was sufficiently crowded. I found a comfortable place to lean on through my hour long commute. the bus reached the next bus stop. A group, well, a mob of students waited at the stop for the same bus just the way I had waited a while before. How my heart fell as the we stopped to let them in. my social conscience and basic humanity evaporated at the thought of being squeezed in further by all those annoying people. I checked myself. They’re people too. They need to get home just like you do. Crap!

My body feels pricked by strangers' touch, their smells, the sweat. The girl in front of me has long frizzy hair. It keeps getting into my face. I fight hard to keep it out of my mouth. I make clear signs of displeasure. She looks at me. What’s she supposed to do? The bus is crowded beyond all imagination. The old ladies keep complaining. Why don’t theses people shut up?

I hungrily eye the group who’s to get off at the next stop. My legs will give away any second now. I keep trying to prevent myself from falling into the lap of the old lady at the adjacent seat. People are getting out now. I politely move to let them go. How I wish I had had the guts to rush for their seats. Its all gone now. How did these people manage to grab those empty seats so fast?.....the rest of the people seem to expand to take up the vacant spaces. I can’t find my feet. My hair’s a mess. I smell like an old currency note.

The bus conductor kept shouting for his money. Old, hardened ladies shouted for him to shut his mouth up as they tried to fish out notes from their bags. The exertion had left me drained. I tried to keep myself conscious by reading the hoardings outside and talking to myself in my head about the others who crowded beside me. A lady coughs. A small child started to non stop. Right when I thought it was getting easier. ‘would you shut that thing up?’ I shout into my head. I’m never having children.

I passed my measly change to the conductor. He eyes me suspiciously. ‘student concession’ . he accusingly thrusts the ticket into my hands. ‘you should be paying me for traveling in your mad truck I tell him in my head. Humph…!

Can’t you drive this thing any faster?........ are we there yet?...

vande mataram

Independence day……

Its 9 minutes to yet another independence day for India. My heart aches with love for this country. The only one I’ve ever known; this land of great mysteries, of even greater tragedies. What’s there in store for us as we embark on another year of ‘freedom’? a food shortage may be and a hand full of bomb blasts and dead bodies and crorepathi politicians.........

Three farmers were shot dead today for standing up for their right to a livelihood. Killed by an administration which spends thousands of crores of rupees in immortalizing their leader’s ‘legacy’ through gigantic statues and monuments but has no time or resources to spend on its poor farmers!

11 schoolchildren died today…..washed off into the unknown as their school bus fell into a river. 11 blooming hopes, 11 dreams and aspirations….gone in a second.

Are these the harbingers to our free yeas ahead?........ or will we some thing in the line of our Olympic gold? Will we feel once again that feeling when our heart lifted out with pride and our eyes filled with joy at the thought of our beloved land……….. the sight of our tricolor rising proudly, accompanied by the sound of our anthem…..

Happy independence day India………I love you.

a little understanding....

A little understanding……….

My best friend is always in trouble with my teacher. Her crime: she’s always late to class in the morning. She’s so bad at being punctual that none of us, teacher included, expect her in class before at least half an hour after class has started. All of us have flaws. Tardiness is her imperfection. Some times we wonder if it’s physically impossible for her to come to class on time. But friends are supposed to be under standing right? And the only way to understand is to find out why. Why is she late to class every single day? What are the road blocks on her path to becoming a teacher’s pet?

Now, my friend’s a typical teenage girl (although with enough brains to know that Europe’s not a country). Anyways, she lives in a typical teenager’s world where many things are expected of you as a ‘typical teenage girl’. After class, some unwritten rule insists that all of us friends hang around chatting about everything and nothing for at least two hours at our class room or at the bus stop or the friendly neighborhood shop cum restaurant, which means that she reaches home a full three hours after class.

Once home the beast in her takes over and she spends some time nourishing her body, tired from her efforts at fulfilling her typical teenage duties. Being a girl and eighteen, she’s doomed to spend the following two hours taking a bath and grooming her hair, skin nails and eyebrows. She painstakingly scrubs, plucks, waxes, tones and moisturizes. At the end of this tedious routine, she’s left with very little time to do her home work and more importantly, to watch TV to enrich her head with very important pieces of information which every teen should know if she’s to sustain any two minute conversation with her peers .she dutifully spends her time enlightening herself on the lives of reality tv stars, actors and other ‘celebs’ .in the midst of this come urgent calls from her friends –boyfriend problems, movie on Saturday?-she multi tasks and manages them all. And if , god forbid, any of her friends has a birthday coming up, she has to spend hours deciding on a gift and making plans to bring about that ‘surprise’ every birthday girl expects. After all this exhausting work she logs on to her orkut/facebook/whatever... account to do the mandatory amount of social net ‘work’-ing . she spends hours replying to all those annoying scraps and scribbles and fending off irritating friend requests from either boring people with no profile photos or hyper active ones with 900 friends. Then at last, past midnight she shuts her laptop with tired eyes only to suddenly remember that the assignment given a month ago was due the next day. Ever the responsible pupil, she dutifully finishes it and collapses onto her mattress after another round of combing, scrubbing and moisturizing.

She’s shook from her slumber by the faithful phone alarm which shouts out some annoying tone.Snooze. Five minutes.There it goes again. Her mom pokes her head into the room. My friend pretends to get up and goes back to sleep. Then a pair of hands, her mom’s, physically removes her from the bed and shakes her till she wakes up.

My poor friend, with only an hour and a half till class begins, takes a ten minute bath and proceeds to dress. An act of no consequence which would take five minutes you’d think. But you’d be very, very wrong. She’s about to make the most important decision of the day in our typical teenage world. That un answerable question: ‘what should I wear??’. She spends half an hour contemplating and trying on different sets of clothes. Then she puts on her favorite pair of jeans and a carefully picked top and proceeds to makeup and hair. She tries on different hair dos and then takes a look at the clock and puts it all into a pony. She carefully draws her eyes and lips .she hunts her drawer for earrings and other paraphernalia and puts them on. And voila, she’s done. Ready to face the world. Thirty minutes to class. What else? Books! She puts her texts and notes into her bag and stuffs her lunch in. no time for break fast, has to catch that last minute bus. She races towards the bus stop, the bus is already at the stop. She runs. The bus jerks forward and then stops again for a lady. She waves wildly. The bus passes her by. The conductor grins.

She waits for the next bus. Ten minutes till class begins. Where have all the buses gone? The next one takes another five minutes to arrive. She jumps in. she prays for the bus to over speed. The conductor looks her up and down as she gives him her student ticket change. ‘Card’ he says.. She fishes out that scrawny little yellow card. The guy looks at her photo and scrutinizes all the little details in it. He gives it back with the ticket. The bus is overflowing. Guys hang on to the door handles with their life. The driver drives slowly lest he should accidentally shake off some of the people dangling on one side. Old ladies push and shove and mess up my friends carefully combed hair. The bus plods through the dirt tracks which lead to the city.

After twenty minutes of torture my friend is pushed out at the college stop by a torrent of humanity. Her dress is crumpled and she realizes that the bath she took in the morning had been a waste. The class has already started. She rushes with other late-birdies and risks her life crossing the road with no zebra crossings or signals. She walks as she can. The campus is eerily quiet. She almost slips and falls while climbing the stairs in her clumsy slippers. She runs to class and is joined by other late comers to our class. They wait at the door with embarrassed expressions as the teacher tries to figure out what to do with them , “ oh, just come in…”she says in exasperation. “The next time, I will send you to the principal, why can’t you come to class on time? You’re only students. What’s keeping you so busy that you can’t make it to class on time?”

With all due respect ma’am, you have no idea………..