The Truant Tales

Read the title in Arnold's accent. Sounds Cooler.

Anyway, I'm back to the online world - back to the world of spam, inane status messages and useless twitters.

The rail wheel factory project was hastily completed, at last. Whoopee! We had to fudge a lot of numbers, the design seems totally flawed and it can barely even increase production if implemented. That's what you get when you give a factory design project to a bunch of 3rd year mechanical students. The amazing part though, and the most shocking part, was that the project in-charge took 30 secs to peruse through our 60 page project (A month's work of slacking), scratched his chin a bit ('The government official in thought' look) and then declared that this was a very good project!

Almost immediately after the end of the project, the sixth semester started. This is the worst semester for mechanical students, ever (Deja Vu. I'm pretty sure I said the same about the last semester). It's a semester of subjects like; Finite Elemental Analysis, Mechanical Vibrations, Theory of Elasticity, Design of Machine Elements II, Heat Mass Transfer and Mechatronics (Yup, we're soo advanced that we have to make up words).

So, to deal with the hopelessness of this semester, a bunch of friends decided to go to Pondicherry and get drunk. It was a three day vacation. Pondicherry is a beautiful place, really clean, especially the French Quarter.


The promenade

I don't remember most of it. Time seemed to fly by, the place seemed unfocused and the ground unsteady. 'Beer - the root and solution to life's problems' - Homer J.

Life's a bitch and here's more proof: It took me a long time to get my voter's ID card. Then life steals it away. The dates for Election 2009 are announced and I can't vote (it's a pain to get the duplicate, and most likely, I won't get it on time). To quote the incumbent, inefficient, incoherent, unintelligent state government - 'It's a conspiracy by the opposition'. Those bastards, I won't have the pleasure of electing them out of office.

Some stories ,observations and experiences from my trip to Mumbai.

My House Arrest

My Dad's been in Thane (a Mumbai suburb) for about a year now and he's a man of routine. Every morning he gets up at 5:30, leaves the house for office at 8:00 and returns at 8:00 in the evening. Whereas I'm a man of impulse. I can get up anytime between 10 and 2:00 in the afternoon, so I'm usually asleep when he's off to the office. Dad's so used to locking the door and taking the keys to the office that he forgot that I was there sleeping in the room and inadvertently locked me in the house. Dad realized his mistake only after he reached the office (a one and a half hour journey). He was going to return only at 8:30 in the evening.

It was hard to pass time. The Tv was showing rubbish (Murphy's law 'Good TV shows are broad casted only when one can't see it'), I was getting tired of hearing the same music on the mp3 player and had already read most of the books there.So I was reduced to writing all the movies I've seen till now (583 and counting), all the Tv shows I've seen (87 and counting) and all the books I've read (103 and counting). Even then I couldn't kill time. So I cleaned the entire house (even did the toilets), did the laundry, cooked for myself, ironed the clothes....in short the lazy pain in the ass was transformed into a 'homemaker'.

The flip side was that guilt got the better side of Dad. He bought 3 Cd's, very costly set of earphones and lot of knick-knacks to buy back my forgiveness. I was ready to forgive and forget until dad proclaimed 'If it takes locking you in the house to get some work out of you, then it'll be best if I lock you in everyday, ha ha'. Anyone from child service reading this?

Why Do pigeons hate me?

Mumbai has a LOT of pigeons. I think its because of the hundreds of low and high rises. Every time I stepped out it either rained or ATLEAST two pigeons pooped on me. And pigeon shit stinks. Its hard to imagine that a tiny little creature like that can do so much doodoo.

A train ride with Mr OCD

The train journey was largely uneventful. I was sharing the cabin with a friendly Gujarati family. Mostly ordinary except the granddad there. He was slow (as do most people with 'advanced age'), but more interestingly he seemed to be obsessed with perfection. He spent half and hour adjusting the window to allow only a particular amount of wind - he moved it up by half an inch, and then down by a centimeter and so on. He also spent the good part of an hour adjusting his bed sheet, pillow and his position in the railway berth.

Its been nearly 2 and a half weeks since I wrote anything good. And now that I have the mood to write something, be assured that this post will be really long.

First, the good news; College is nearly over. Only thing that remains are the yearly exams, which is in the first week of July. So there would be no more regular classes (till Mid August) where I'd have to pretend like I'm listening and nod my head in agreement every few minutes.

But, the majority of the post will be about the 3 day vacation in the beautiful district of Dakshin Canara, in the West Coast of Karnataka, South India. I've uploaded the pictures in my photo album.

Back To The Roots

Tha family left early in the morning for Mangalore, which is about a 10 hour journey from Bangalore, to attend my cousin's thread ceremony. I had decided to leave later in the night alone due to college commitments. So in the night I boarded the fully Air-conditioned 'airavat' bus hoping to sit next to an actress who'd come after a bikini shoot. Unfortunately, I got to sit next to an old guy who snored throughtout the night. Also the guy in front of me was an inconsiderate slob who inclined his seat fully. But the worst part of the jouney was when we were travelling over the Western Ghats. Western Ghats is a mountain range running all along the western coast of South India. The road winds along the mountains, and the drivers having travelled on this road a million times before, tend to drive very fast on the hair-pin bends. As luck would have it, the guy next to me got motion sickness and kept puking into the plastic bag. This being an AC bus, the smell stuck to me.

As I, still smelling like vomit, joined my family in a small motel near the beautiful city of Mangalore, I knew that things could get only worse. Because the two things I hate the most are family functions and temples. And here I was going to attend a fumily function in a temple!!!

The thread ceremony or 'Upanayaya' [Photos] is a ceremony held to symbolize the advent of a child into manhood. In this they do an elaborate ritual and ultimately put a thread or a 'janivara' on you to symbolise that you've become a 'brahmin'. My cousin still suffering from the long journey was feeling really ill and was vomiting all over the place during the ritual.

A lot of people from the extended family were present. Aunts, Aunt's aunts, Parent's cousins, Grandparent's cousins, etc were all present seemingly to torture me. I had to sit throught three hours of pointless conversations like;

" Why do you have a stuble? You look like a sick drug addict. Do you smoke weed?"
" The Last time I saw you, you were very small!!" (Duh!! People grow. When will they ever learn this basic fact?)
" How is college? Do you study hard? My daughter got 96% in her First Semester exam. How much did you get?" (Holy Crap!!! My marks are paltry compared to that.)

In these functions, the people divide themselves into three main groups. Group one are the men, chatting about the country's economy or politics or how the next generation (with a lot of men pointing at me) have corrupted morals due to TV, music and 'the Western conspiracy'. Group Two are the women, gossiping about their husbands or trying to set people up for an arranged marraige (Again with a lot of pointing at me, even though I'm only 18.) Group three consists of the kids, discussing about Pokemon, DragonBall Z or anyother Shitty Japanese anime or trying to engage a fight with someone (Again with a lot of pointing at me). As you can probably guess, I fit in neither of the three groups, so I'm the loner sitting separately wishing I could be back home.

X----------------------------------------------------------------------X

My fingers Pain. So I'll continue the raving and ranting in the next post, which is the fun part of the trip - holidaying in the beaches of Murudeshwar.