The Project Outing

When we were flipped upside down for the first time ,I heard Nikhil curse loudly.For a moment, I was surprised to hear him curse . In our acquaintance over the last six months or so, this was the first time ever that I heard him swear. We were seated on a ride called 'Flip Out' in Adventure Island, a theme park in Rohini and being twirled upside down forty feet above the ground. I was hanging on to the harness because my life depended on how tight it was wrapped across my chest. As the ride got over , relief was etched across all our faces. There were six of us from my office who had taken this ride together but once it was done no one wanted to give it another shot. The fact that we had taken lunch just before taking this ride and nobody was forced to do projectile vomiting in mid-air was nothing short of a miracle.

It was a pity that this was the only decent adrenalin pumping ride in the theme park . The theme park was the venue of a long overdue project outing . Barring the flip out ride all the other rides were meant exclusively for the enjoyment of little kids. I find my daily ride in the cycle rickshaw to the bus stop more thrilling than most of the joyrides in Adventure Island.

I couldn't help but compare this theme park with Veegaland in cochin. More than twenty of us had gone there in our final year of college and had a phenomenal time. The rides were grand and there were some really funny incidents. Like Sid crying for Mama when he was being whirled 360 degrees in the twin flip monster ride and all of us making fun of Saif losing his hair in the middle of the free fall .

While here in rohini we had some senior guys leaving early because they were missing office dearly. One lasting image I have from this trip is of my immediate manager after he had finished his turn on a stupid aeroplane ride. He was heaving a sigh of relief, wiping some sweat from his brow as though suggesting 'that ride was something' when 8-9 year old kids were finding the same ride mighty boring.

The Jaundice experience

Recollecting the horrors of the week, when I was diagnosed with jaundice ,quite frankly still gives me the shivers. It took the doctor five days and a blood test report to conclude that jaundice was the reason why I was vomiting whatever I was eating and why my piss was the color of gold.
Apparently some god-damned liver enzyme counts had skyrocketed leaving me all weak,crazy and yellow.

I had a persistent headache for close to two weeks . Headaches have never bothered me much hitherto , but in those two weeks I almost lost touch with sanity. To make matters worse I was also ravaged with grumbling stomach aches .

My stomach had become a fortress guarded by a force which was refusing the entry of almost everything I was eating ,past the alimentary canal.I had zero appetite and when I was forced to eat something by my parents, in a matter of minutes most of what I had eaten was puked away.The food which would make it past the stomach would then lay there undigested and cause me stinging pain all throughout.

The very frequent runs I had to make to the bathroom to vomit in this condition didn't make life any easier. I was experiencing pangs of nausea arising from the pit of my stomach which were so freaking painful and seemingly well capable of snapping some blood vessel in my body and possibly choke me to death.

I was glad I was hospitalized after some experimental ayurvedic treatment in the first week. In fact, it was my idea to seek allopathy because the ayurvedic arishtams (medicine) forced down my throat were increasing the frequency of my run to the bathroom to vomit. The disgusting arishtams tasted far worse than what sewage would taste like .

My sense of taste was severely debauched by the taste of these arishtams and puke . I remember brushing my teeth repeatedly in spite of how weak I felt , to get rid of this bad taste in my mouth. But their effect was so strong that I used to end up with a minty flavor to the arishtam-puke distasteful combo .

I took me six weeks to convalesce and the latter four weeks were quite relaxing . My hospital stay had ridden me of all aches and with just weakness to deal with. I read books and watched lots of TV. I also feasted on two rasgullas a day as prescribed by the doctor because it is supposed to be good for the liver.

Good job Bindra

Hello readers
For the last four weeks I've been down with Jaundice. When I was diagnosed after a blood test ,my eyeballs were fiendishly yellow , my stomach was on the verge of imploding and I had almost completely lost my mind. So, I was hospitalized .It took me four days in the hospital to regain my appetite and some degree of composure.

I was eventually discharged . The doctor prescribed four more weeks of complete bed rest and a truckload full of medicine. So, at home , pretty much bedridden , on a bright Monday morning ,I switched on the TV to checkout how India is faring in the deciding third test match between India and Sri Lanka. I saw a breaking news scrolling on a news channel ,saying that an Indian shooter named Abhinav Bindra had qualified to the finals of some 10 meter event.When I switched to DD sports I saw a table which showed the results of the qualifying round and Bindra's name was fourth on it.

I sat up with excitement. This was a great opportunity for Bindra to make history. I also had my doubts because, as we all know very well ,our athletes have a history of screwing up when it matters the most.Two names which come to my mind are Milkha Singh and P.T Usha. Bindra was fourth on the list and the points from the qualifying round were to be carried on to the final event , so to entertain any likelihood of a medal, he had to outperform his qualifying efforts .

I didn't have an inkling of an idea about the rules of Shooting, so thanks to the DD sports commentators ( I find the lot very irksome on most accounts) I understood that there is a board with concentric circles on which the shooter is supposed to aim . If the shot hits the board inside the smallest circle then the shooter would get a score between 10.0 and 11.0 depending on how close to the center the shot lands. In the final event all the shooters who had qualified were allowed ten shots each .

The final event began and after the first four shots Bindra had crept up to the third position. After a couple of more shots he was second and after the eighth shot he was on top of the list. All his shots were marked above 10.2 which showed remarkable consistency. He was followed by a Finnish shooter called Hakkinen at second position and by a Chinese shooter at third . Bindra's ninth shot was a meager 10. 0 , a major setback by the high standards he had set, right through the final round . Hakkinen, whose ninth shot was marginally better than Bindra's drew level . At this juncture they both had equal sum of points.

There was one shot left, and because of my skepticism as regards Indian athletes I had my reservations on Bindra not doing something silly. He proved me wrong and shot a fantastic 10.8 which was his best shot in the entire final round. At the same time Hakkinen messed up his last shot with a paltry 9.7. Not only did he lose the gold medal , he also squandered the silver as the Chinese shooter had shot his last shot well and ended up overtaking the Finn.

It was quite phenomenal to behold Bindra's uncompromising resolve and absolute focus in the final round.He reserved his best for the last and didn't ever look slightly nervous. Had he settled for a silver or a bronze, he would have still been heralded as an icon by our berserk media . The government which had almost no contribution in his success would have still offered him Crores of rupees as bounty and all kinds of medallions for being the saving grace for India at the Olympics . Instead he tarnished India's 28 year amazing feat of zero gold medals in the Olympics.

Afterward as he stood on top of the podium ,there wasn't any animated show of emotion from him ,just a sly smile as he was handed over a bouquet of flowers first and then an accolade which no individual Indian athlete has ever accomplished before ;an Olympic gold medal. And by the way the Indian cricket team lost the test match the very same day and it almost went unnoticed by the media and most cricket fanatics like me.

The beggar with the drum

Hello readers. I am going to give an account of a wacky happening which in my reckoning is one of the most bizarre incidents that I have ever witnessed with my own dear eyes. A passing thought about it ,still brings a smile to my face and even to this day if it is shared with some of my family members ,who were co-witnesses , it is usually followed by shrieks of laughter .

It was a languid afternoon in may 1998, in Kerala, and I along with my mother, granny,aunt Bhadra ,my sister and three little cousins Vaishak, Vishnu and Jishnu were watching a humdrum mallu movie in the living room of our abode ,Bhadralayam. I and my cousins were biding our time, waiting for it to be evening so that the elders would let us venture out ,to play cricket. Suddenly the spell of indolence was broken by loud sounds of chenda ( a cylindrical wooden drum like instrument played in southern India) emanating from the front lawn of our habitation. As the sound reverberated through Bhadralayam, its inmates were drawn outside to the source of the unpleasant banging.

What we saw was quite a queer sight. A dark-skinned ,beanpolish,eccentric -looking and bearded beggar who was dressed in black from head to toe was beating away on a chenda and creating quite a racket . His rather tall frame and the fact that his countenance was uniformly dark made him look frightening. Such was his appearance, that in my opinion he could have made a lucrative career with the Ramsays as a permanent bhoot in their horror shows. There he was , drumming away with raw energy on a day which was so hot that it kept an outdoor crazy, thirteen year old (your's truly) and his three insolent little cousins- indoors watching a forgettable movie.

Little Vishnu ,however felt the drum-beats to his liking. What was loud and incoherent banging to the rest of us , was soulful and rhythmic music to the little lad. He didn't waste much time before beginning an insane version of pandi dance(it 's a weird dance form seen in south Indian movies , if you have not seen it yet then switch to sun-tv sometime to have a good laugh;nobody does it better than Chiranjeevi ) . This paved the way for Vaishakh and Jishnu to drop their inhibitions and join the little fellow . The troika even started humming a tune , which gelled quite well with the drum beating.

As the mendicant ,who was quite immersed in beating his percussion instrument , recollected his wits , I could guarantee that he was shell shocked to see the three kids dancing away to glory.In other houses he would have intimidated the younger ones, sending shivers down their spines and making them hide under the farthest tables and closets out of sheer trepidation. Here, these juveniles were requesting a once more. He collected the 50 paisa coin , his bounty offered by an elder so that he could go away and the kids would stop embarrassing the household .

After this freak incident ,I don't know if the beggar was traumatized because his main weapon- exuding fear didn't work at all here or super-happy because of the appreciation received for his music. But he was never seen again in the neighborhood.

Santosh and his dislocated shoulder

Last month , one Sunday evening in Greater Noida while I was inside a cyber cafe with ash and kabir, I heard from Kabir that Santosh Hegde has dislocated his shoulder somehow. Santosh was in my room when this happened. The other inhabitant of my room Bosco had a plaster cast on his left foot, so we conjectured that Hegde got hurt while trying to help Bosco roam around .

When I returned to my training campus I heard from Bosco that Santosh had fallen from the bed and landed on his right shoulder .His shoulder joints are very sensitive and he has had similar experiences of shoulder dislocation in the past.But on all previous occasions, he had managed to put the bone back in its place himself. He wasn't very lucky this time around and he had to be taken to the hospital. In my room that morning, Santosh who weighs a meager 63 kilos and has threadlike biceps ,had heroically succeeded in doing 15 push ups .That must have been way too much load for his fragile shoulder joints .

So, Dias who was also in my room when the dislocation occurred,took him to the nearby Sharda hospital.After dinner I and Varun M decided to pay Santosh a visit in the hospital. Our training campus is in a god forsaken place with large and empty farmlands surrounding it. There is an abandoned road which leads to the hospital and which is ironically incredibly well lit up with dozens of street lights .The laborers who work there in the neighborhood , the cattle and the canines use the road to answer all calls of nature.

We brave hearts traipsed the deserted two kilometers from the campus to the hospital with a nagging fear of possible raids from highwaymen. The whole journey we were contemplating defense strategies against possible attacks .On the threshold of the hospital we had to jump over a barb - wired fence which might have torn the three-fourths Varun was wearing.

We met Santosh and his slender chest was wrapped tightly in a blanket like brown colored bandage. My batchmate Ganesh was there alongwith Dias and they were exchanging civilities with a mallu male nurse. We expected Santosh to be crying in agony but his disposition was jovial .After being admitted, he was given two bottles of glucose drips and he felt like he is high on five bottles of beer.Dias decided to stay with the patient for the night and after a while I,Varun and Ganesh bid adieu to the two of them and headed back to the campus amidst fears of raiders, barb wires and hostile canines.

Santosh was discharged the next afternoon with a shoulder immobilizer .The immobilizer is a pad which is wrapped around his torso with two bands ,one to to be tied around the wrist and the other around the area between the elbow and the shoulder.he had to wear it for three weeks i.e till the end of the training period.

Thanks! Sachin

Aricent finally e-mailed my appointment letter on the 30th of June .I was eagerly anticipating the arrival of this e-mail since may. That day,my future co-employee Rachit informed me that he got his appointment letter.When I logged on to my impish(awesome_aj...) yahoo id, I found to my extreme displeasure that my date of joining is on the 10th of September and that I'd have to head south once again ,to chennai.
Since the day I was selected ,the possibility of getting to work in Delhi and living in my own house, had been a source of elation for me. So, I didn't take this bit of information very well. I started conjecturing that I may not find my kind of people in chennai. Which could lead me into isolation , make me a recluse- removed from the stir of society. I would never want to live either as such a misanthropist or a puppet-compromising and making adjustments to fit in a group .
There was a cricket match on that day ,India vs South Africa . Makhaya Ntini and Andre Nel were dishing out a barrage of short pitched deliveries to the hapless Indian openers. They were bowling as though they had a mortal feud unavenged with the batsmen. Then,out of the blue ,Tendulkar counter-attacked.He pulled Ntini four or five times for boundaries and hooked Nel, over the square leg fence for a massive six. He drove on the rise with aplomb ,took the attack to the spinner(i forgot his name) and never allowed the bowlers to settle into any rhythm.He batted like the Sachin of old ,watching whom, an awe-struck Bradman remarked (to his wife)"Honey, Watch this young lad, I think this is how I used to play!".Sachin got out at 93. India went on to win.
This masterpiece of an innings had a therapeutic effect on me. My prospects brightened and I stopped sulking.I started thinking that Chennai could not be all that bad, after all the city is a metropolis. Besides, I won't get a lot of time for much social endeavors because there's bound to be a lot of work in my office. Sachin cheered me up in ninety minutes.Had he not played the way he did it would have taken me a lot more time to have seen things in the right perspective.

Four Mountain Bound Loonies

Last week ,your humble narrator went up north to the glorious hill station - manali with buddies Dias, Joe and Sudu. The day we reached there, we dallied and rambled about the hadimba temple,clubhouse and other tourist hot spots. The next day we made an expedition to Rohtang pass which is high on top of the mountains. As our mode of transport we tactlessly decided to rent a couple of bullets inspired by some adventure seeking ,reckless western tourists .
We rode up and around some very steep and spectacular mountains. We also beheld sights of such pristine beauty, my friends ,that it took our breaths away. Such as the enormous spread of vegetation , valleys which appeared thousands of miles below , the River Beas originating on top of some nondescript ,snow capped mountains and some gorgeous glaciers.There was a setback however, which broke the spell of enchantment cast by nature upon us.We were stopped on our tracks by the border security personnel because none of us was wearing a helmet.After a great deal of pleading and cajoling they took mercy on us and let us go.
We eventually made it to the pass where we witnessed thousands of tourists, mostly Indians, having the time of their lives, doing all kinds of stuff like skiing,taking a ride on very swift motor sledges and also riding the not so swift ,pride of the Himalayas-the yak .As soon as your awe-struck narrator stepped on to the snow, some snow crept inside his rented boots and his feet went numb with cold. Later on, I did the stupid mistake of making a little snow ball to throw at the others, with my bare hands only to find my hands emulating my feet.Things started to get worse for your almost comatose narrator. I developed a headache and while the others were rollicking and frolicking in the snow, I was resting on a big enough rock trying to catch my breath. Joe complained of headaches too.
After half an hour,we decided to return . I sat behind Sudu and after staring the bike sudu realized that the acceleration cable had come off the handle. Dias and joe scampered in all directions to find a mechanic .They couldn't find any.Some onlookers advised to take the bike sixteen kilometers downhill ,in neutral, to a place called marhi where there was a slight probability of us finding a mechanic. It wasn't all downhill, there were the occasional ascents where the whole business of pushing the heavy duty royal enfield was excruciating.
While sudu gallantly handled the screwed up bike. Dias , I and Joe went triples, all this my dear readers, on a narrow highway four thousand meters above sea level. After some agonizing pushing and shoving we made it to marhi . There was no mechanic there. A gentleman recommended to tie the acceleration cable around the forefinger of the rider and pull at it, to start the bike. This very belligerent idea worked. The proactive Sudu did the honors.
From here on, I sat behind dias. After having ridden another fifteen kilometers we chose to take a break, you know,to rest our stressed up buttocks and take some photographs ,in some heavenly surroundings.After this short hiatus, the royal enfield being bridled by dias refused to start up. Sudu promised help and went on his way still pulling at the cable of his bike with his forefinger.We had to travel another twenty kilometers to reach manali.His bullet had mood swings later and both the bikes had to be maneuvered ,post dusk, with no street lights ,downhill, in neutral.
We made it alive to manali at around eight in the evening and I reckon both sudu and dias should get medals for their fortitude .