a day in a train

I've never been too much of a long distance traveller. the longest journey I've ever embarked on took me 25 hours thanks to a 5 hour breakdown (it was a bus journey from bangalore to bombay, btw).

this one on the other hand is scheduled to take 29 hours. bombay to chennai.

I'm currently 23 hours and 4 states into the journey, and it's been okayish with a strong hint of boring. probably because of the company though.

the 25 hour bus journey was wit marj after all, and I do have a record breaking 7 hour phone conversation to set some sort of perspective to how well we get along.

unfortunately for me this time, my friend can sleep almost unlimited hours...and apparently so can the remaining 4 people we share our berths with. I was pretty surprised when I woke up at 7:30am to find everyone in my berth asleep, and everyone in the other berths with their curtains drawn, presumably also asleep. trudged to the loo expecting a long line and a 45 minute wait. but I didn't see a line, and the loo was spic and span, and there was no one waiting impatiently even after I took all of 15 minutes to do my business. in fact, the people who had preordered breakfast were woken up by the trays shoved onto their snoring faces (to be fair though he did perfunctorily try to wake them up).

I on the other hand had already brushed and was already feeling the pangs of post crap stomach emptiness. so far so good. but my friend fell asleep right after breakfast, and so did everyone else. some people just skipped breakfast and woke up straight for lunch. which was at noon btw. I slept quite well myself, probably more due to the fact that it was Sunday morning than anything else. everyone woke up for lunch and slept promptly after. I was bored out of my wits by the monotonies of reading, listening to music, and sleeping. i had just finished my book, and my friend was hungry, because we didn't quite comprehend the menu as it was being recited to us, and ordered just half a lunch. so we went to the pantry, two coaches away. which incidentally is the furthest I've walked in the last 24 hours. the train had stopped at a platform when we were done eating so we walked back on the platform. my only 120 seconds outside of the train today.

the train started as we reached our coach so we were forced back in. so I took out my diary, and after over 2 years of carrying it around on vacations, wrote a whole page in it.

unfortunately diaries are limited to a page a day, so I was back to reading. by 6pm I was bored enough to let myself the luxury of an hour of surfing on roaming charges with no charging point in sight. I was that bored. back to reading, this time arundhati roy's "god of small things", which I read till dinner at 8 and then lights out at 10.

I can't wait for the train to reach chennai. still 6 hours to go. and that's if it actually reaches in time, which trains rarely do.

and I'm still one hour short of a whole day in this train.

ps: first post typed on my new phone. woo hoo!

Stop staring!

If you look into people's eyes for long enough, you'll realize every frikkin human being is cross eyed.

-- kris, one evening, after waiting 20 minutes for a friend to turn up.

erase and rewind

i just love my head. there's never a moment when i don't know what i wanna listen to...because there's always something playing inside!

-- kris, one saturday morning, on waking up with meatloaf playing in his head

boredom

what do you do when your blog is on its way to looking like a cobweb on the www?

you change the colour scheme.

welcome to my green-tinted multicoloured cobweb.

divergent reality

last sunday, i happened to be passing through bandra at an earthly hour (namely, late morning), and so i decided to pay grandma a visit. unfortunately for me, i was rather exhausted, and dropped off to sleep within an hour or two.

i then woke up, went out without her noticing, met a couple of friends who happened to be lunching nearby, grabbed a bite myself, came back, and then announced that i'm now tired *AND* stuffed, and went back to sleep.

and woke up half an hour later.

and realized it was all a dream.

except that i'm still not sure if it was. or maybe that was reality, and i'm dreaming now. or maybe i fell asleep and haven't woken yet.

giving up

lent began a couple of weeks ago. a close friend of mine remarked a few days before ash wednesday, that since i derive most of my pleasure out of my weekend trips, i should give that up for lent.

for good measure, i decided to give up alcohol too.

i'm currently wondering whether there was any point to either.

because now that i'm in bombay, i've started enjoying my weekends spent here. meeting friends and family, getting pending work done, watching movies, visiting old hangouts and discovering new ones.

and now that i've stopped drinking, i'm back to foodie-ism with a vengeance.

bottomline is, i'm enjoying myself anyway. so what's the point of giving all this stuff up? i could even give up all the stuff i currently enjoy (off the top of my head: eating meat, listening to music, twitter, facebook...) and still be as good as ever.

so what's the point of all this "detachment" and pious giving up and all, really? all i'm left with are fleeting regrets, of things that i wanted to do but didn't. not that i care too much about them, but hey, they're there.

ps: don't bother telling me to start travelling and drinking again. that's decided, and i'm not gonna change my mind till easter dawns. i'm musing about the future here.

lost in (cyber)space

there was a time (starting about 10 years ago, when i started "collecting" jokes) when i had a photographic memory for jokes. if i read a joke once, i'd remember it for the rest of my life. maybe not well enough to narrate it again, but definitely well enough to tell, 5 years later, that i've heard that one before.

anyway, cut back to today.

someone posted some question on twitter, and that got me searching google for a post on my blog that answered it. unfortunately, my google-fu wasn't too good, and i couldn't find it. and randomly, somewhere on the results page, i clicked on one unrelated link that grabbed my attention.

i started reading about the top 10 things that are wrong with windows mobile. it was a nice and funny post, and mostly true too!

i was so engrossed in reading it, that i read the comments too. the last comment was especially cool, i thought:

i agree with all your points except pocket outlook, memory and performance:
on my last 2 phones (o2 zinc/sony x1) outlook worked like a charm, html, embedded pictures/tables, everything. lack of filters in outlook is no big deal if you have filters in exchange/imap (gmail in my case). lack of rich text in the composer is the only drawback, i guess.
as for memory, it’s not a memory leak at all. windows mobile 6 onwards has a cache (5 and before didn’t), so it keeps free mem to a minimum and uses the rest for a cache. it greatly improves speed and battery life. you can tell when the cache isn’t in action, as the battery starts getting warm and draining when the device is genuinely running low on memory.
as for performance, winMo6 is excellent!!! the only drawback is the lack of dedicated graphics hardware in most handsets, and corresponding software support for it. have you ever tried opening a folder with 100+ files in it in symbian? or doing a full text search on 2000+ texts in your inbox? winMo6 beats the rest by miles!!!

i read the comment and said to myself: wow, how awesome. someone who's used an o2 zinc too. that's pretty rare. and this comment was really good too. he said everything i wanted to say, and i actually couldn't think of anything more to add.

i thought i should post a comment saying that i 100% agree with the comment above. i scrolled a bit so that i could see the author's nickname, to use in my comment.

and almost choked on myself.

the comment was by me.

it was posted april 21st, 2009. about 10 months ago.