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Monday 7 February 2011

Morning Rush and Gold Blush

 




Kindly take all reasonable steps to purchase your tickets was the sign board on the train as i grabbed a seat along with my friend for a Sunday morning adventure. I wondered what they meant by that line , cos I had taken the escalator and did not climb any steps. Lol ! Myself and Ramesh , one more friend of mine decided to go to Ballarat , a little town on the outskirts of Melbourne on a bone chilling day at 13 degrees. I was excited at the prospect of a train journey as this will ensure me ticking off travelling by all means of transport on land ,sea and air. I always used to look at these funky looking aerodynamic trains called the Vline , as i walk across the southern cross station. Today I was on one of these so called high speed trains in Australia. First impressions were nice with me checking the foam , the interiors and legroom of the seats. I looked at the coach and see just a few people seating scattered all across the coach. I wondered to the colossal waste of infrastructure , 50 people and a 300 seater train. Well what do i care , i said to myself and gazed at the window seat as the train made It way out of the station and then was this irritating sound which goes like rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr the humming sound of the engine . To my utter dismay the vibrations of the engine could be felt all over the coach, so much for advanced technological coaches, trains back in India never have these things and its just the sheer pleasure of hearing the clickety clack , clickety clack of the tracks as the train rumbles along. And then are these windows shielding you from the elements outside. 


Hated the eerie feeling sitting in the train , I just love train journeys for the fact that I can gaze at the window seat with diesel soot smelling air or the whiff of the brakes on my face across the country side. Nothing beats the sleeper class coaches of India. 2 hours later as we reached Ballarat , we were ushered in straight onto a waiting bus where the bus driver was giving us instructions when he said that he would pick us back by 3 30 . There was this Chinese girl who said in a thick accent , bus leaving at 4 30. The driver said no , its 3 30 and after which i lost count of the time he had to reiterate stating its 3 30 , on my last count he said at least 17 times.


10 minutes later and we enter Sovereign Hill , home of the Gold rush , this is the place of the 19th century gold rush in Australia where large gold deposits were found. The place was really nice with the feeling of one being transported into a time machine back to the past. The setup and people in the periodic costumes made it so realistic and me and ramesh enjoyed every bit of it. And the ride was ended with a very nostalgic horse drawn carriage ride. By 3 o clock we were done and we were walking the streets of Ballarat scouting for food . And food was there indeed at 5 bucks , to our amazement regular pizza and drink at 5 dollars. We wondered if 3 pm still meant lunch cos the offer said so , we hungry souls went in and asked , err is that 5 thing still valid ? to which the lady replied yes it is , job done and as we waited for the pizza , one of the guys in the shop removed the 5 thing and out revealed another offer. Me and Ramesh gave each other the pheww look. 


Pizza on the backpack and off we went on the beaten track to the bus ready to drop us off at the station. The train back to Melbourne was at 4 10 , so we settled down one the station benches to have the luncheon. Ramesh and myself were chomping away and suddenly from nowhere the pizza box from his lap went flying in the air did a flip over and landed smack on the floor . It was quite a scene , we both had pizzas in our mouth and we just were gazing at each other eyes rolling side to side with the oh shit expression !. Luckily the pizza was inside the box and escaped contamination. Back again on the train and this time after the half box pizza in the tummy , we escaped the humming sound of the train by putting on the headfones. The last i remember was some regional number playing in my ear and i had gone zzzzzzzz. I woke with a startled look when i heard the voice 'Tickets please'. Some power nap it was for 45 minutes , both me and Ramesh woke up just what a place to get up . We opened our eyes when the train was at a station called Sunshine. Home sweet homies in 30 minutes and crashed to my lower berth couch in my room. 


Until next time ....

Saturday 5 February 2011

Of Criticisms and Inspirations

I certainly did not expect to come back so soon with another blog in such short span of time.Welcome back again to my  blog . Hmm its the weekend as i pen this down . Apologies for the frequent downtime on my previous blog post , it had to be tweaked and tweaked .


Well the days preceding the weekend was just as usual , I had to change places to be in more proximity to my team , there was nothing new as such cos the new place where i was going to was pretty routine for me , as i used to sit there in my weekend working. My manager came across and with a beaming smile said 'Shyam , you have to shift , i thought maybe the smile was a nice one and smiled back and guffawed oh no i am not shifting . She gave back with a smile saying 'Oh yes you are with a wave of  energy to which i refused again , until the writing was clear and the tone a lot more crisp like a Shyam ! . Uh oh now thats not a person speaking , thats my manager ordering , i said to myself and politely obliged.


I thought the shifting was a big ordeal , pheww the moving of the monitors and stuff and cleaning up of my new table. Imagine , it was me ! saying my place needs cleaning , one of my teammates passed me a few wet wipes to clean. As i was cleaning the table , i noticed the whiff of lavender kinda babyish lavender , and i asked hmm nice smell to which my team mate said oh you like it , its baby wet wipes !.


Hours skipped by and soon it was the evening of the friday and boy was weekend already in .The weather dint seem it was gonna hold up ,darky clouds loomed across the streets as I walked along the CBD and generally window shopping some dvds . I grabbed 2 of em which were on sale and went home. Quick cofee and i grabbed my couch to finish my 2 states to where i left it. 3 hours later i was done with it and then i started watching transformers 2 and finally hit the sack at 2 am . Beep beep goes my microwave as the clock struck 11 . And from then I had only 2 angles to my body , either it was 90 up on the laptop or 180 on the couch . And if my mum reads this she will probably freak out and by now uttering oh my god , shyam please change thing.


But hey I finally moved from 180 to a sudden burst if energy to clean up my house and shower to be a lot more presentable . Evening was raining again and then back to the non rental house. Those who don't know what is the non rental house , go back 2 blogs to figure out.


And Shriya gave me the gossip of my blog , apparently my previous blog had created some masala to be spread across, obviously the masala creator would have been the masala recipient , which is why newton 3rd law has happened and of course news goes faster with girls than the channel 7 or ndtv. 
And now I was thinking , wats next , i really dint feel happy to tweak my blogs and of course it was a kind of criticism and i decided to put my criticism to really more inspirational blog writing . And with that fire in me , i began writing this blog and I am actually done.


Seeya all in my next one 

Friday 4 February 2011

Whining day and getting to know ananya !

Statutory Disclaimer
The characters and incidents portrayed and the names herein are not fictitious and any similarity to the name, character and history of any person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and unintentional. So you have 3 choices , either close this window or learn to write blogs or develop a sense of humour to appreciate them.



Whrrrrrrrr goes my table fan about a foot away from me as it tries to cool my ever so hot laptop. These days my laptop goes berserk , the so called notebook of mine becomes a hotbook on constantly being on facebook.

The morning was the laziest of all, I got up at 7 30 and made some coffee for myself and then scoured around my ramshackle room to see wats there ... and yea the clothes bag was full. As I just lazily sipped my coffee ,I opened my office laptop , I don’t know why I bought it the day before , I guess some intention of working , does it ever happen ? No way and here I was logging in to my office laptop in nothing but my shorts, ahh the feeling of doing hard work in nothing but Bermudas! I had some work to be done at home so took a half day work from home.
Normally work from home would mean logged in loafing out , well as always I was in working this time around as well listening to my favourite numbers from old Hindi songs.

I hit a problem when running a few things at work and immediately moved onto my communicator to catch hold of a team to help me out, we called them the NV team and by far the most hated team by me .Not that they were a pack of bad humans, but yea they were this highly intelligent set of people who thought mistakes is never in their dictionary and that they are always right. I tend to disagree with that concept because humans do make mistakes and if there is anyone who s probability of making mistakes is less ,its gotta be those lifeless things that make card board boxes or fancy cars called robots.

I was breaking my head to get things sorted out, and sent a mail to some gizmo geek who is known to solve these issues, when my manager's mail came scathing to my mail box fuming away that I had not used the right channel. I was grumbling to glory on reading it and promptly pinged an apology on the office messenger. Soon the issue got sorted out and I was just working away to glory and came across these odd jobs, afternoon time and after a quick shower made my way to the office.


Post lunch was the usual with some training and bouncing towards the fag end of the day, went out for a little stroll and came back. I had forgotten some little piece of work and went back to my desk to wake my computer again. Not the usual me to be so dedicated , heheh I had my reasons , one little peek over my cubicle and I could see my boss still there , so yea golden rule , don’t leave before the boss, was to be maintained. Lol. Evening ish and I make my way towards the exit and when I saw Shriya running the other side, Shriya is my office colleague, but we are more best friends than office colleagues. One of my other friends Anu was leaving the next day and as I walked passed her, I quickly yapped that I am going to anu's place and will meet up soon in 30mins.


They say never give a girl a time cos they aren’t good at it either, but yea blunder was made. I was just coming out of Anu's place to leave home, when Shriya buzzed and asked on my whereabouts and I promptly replied just starting from anu's place. She was like saying bye huh! , I sheepishly said a half baked ya!


Not that I dint want to say the truth , but I could sense that she was pretty miffed at me not coming in my said 30 mins and its gonna be more and ever since Poorthi gave me the tagline, the 'there for all ' guy which I have been vehemently denying that I am not , things weren’t to good .


Soon the miffedness of Shriya was to be felt, when I reached her place a good 90 mins later, much to my disappointment of seeing empty nandos chips and sauce. The only thing left was butter buns. Made my way to grab one but in less than a minute all were in my tummy. Prasad was there as well , and yep I had to be the topic of yet another scathing and slow digging , which I don’t quite mind, until the girl shot her one liner like this smart weapon , so wats all your girl friends saying , mr there for all .


I kept mum and dint say a word, I certainly was not too happy too hear that, but I didn’t want to defend either cos I know my defending will be little messy. I was telling myself , probably yea , next time she says there for all , I should just go up about my routine and not tell where and what I am doing cos then she is no person special that I tell her . Do I say it, no! and it irks me even more when those 2 gang up and pull my leg harder , Perhaps it is more so cos Prasad ends up meeting all the other girls and sometimes more frequently and he doesn’t get pulled or rather I don’t really bother to be so stoopish to pull his leg . All these were just in my head and still I hadn’t uttered a word. 15 mins later when Prasad left home, I was left behind reading the odd books and struggling with a very irritating back pain.


I grabbed the laptop to see any fb messages , none were there and that was when I grabbed the 2 states book , that book interested me for a long time , my mum had it and it was written by chetan bhagat as well .
I started reading a few pages when I was getting to know ananya in detail. Relax guys! Ananya is chetan's gf in the book and as he kept describing his meetings with ananya, so am I also on the same path.


The book was certainly pretty humorous and as I read the pages, I realised that I loved chetan's book for his simplicity in writing wherein you can relate your self from a common man perspective especially if you are in the same age group. When I started my blogs I used to write like those until somewhere I became a jerk and wrote stuff too mundane and not having that masala touch.


My mind went tizzy and happy too as if I found some lost part of it , soon dinner was ready and me and Shriya were hogging away to glory with the distant drums of the Chinese new year going clang bang , the muted TV and the laptop showing noting hill , a Julia Roberts movie . I very vaguely remember seeing the movie before, but yea no worries with the 2nd watch.


So dinner was done and as noting hill was going on, I noticed that I missed my tram; I was offered so stay until the next 10 mins when the next tram arrives. By now I had decided to express my displeasure with the statement she made, but maybe I was inspired to do something crazy to just convey my thought and yet now take it so serious.


Thinking this , I missed my 2nd tram as well , but nah I was sensible to get out and on my out , I yelled to Shriya as I was slamming the door , ' I am not meeting any girl friends tomorrow '. She went inside the room and I was like gosh you dint hear it!!! Nah 2 seconds later she rewinded back to the place where she has to enter the room and asked WHAT! So you had some other plans? To which I shot back, Na! I am not the there for all kind of guy. I think I made my point there and was continuing to read 2 states on my way back home.


Big thanks to the book, cos thats the one which inspired me to write this blog and finding my bearing in my blog world of English language.


Till the next one


Seeya all, peace and love