Travel o travel o travel - Covering the miles all 1835 of them !

The next day started with a flight out at 730 a.m. from Bombay to Calcutta to be followed by a 3:30 hour train journey from Calcutta to Jamshedpur. Since I had to get to Jamshedpur from Bombay a distance of  1835 km according to google maps, the best way was to actually take the flight to Calcutta ( 2:45 hours) followed by a 3:30 hour journey by train. There were a couple of variables here, one the journey between Dum-Dum and Howrah and the infamous traffic jams on Howrah Bridge and the second was the company that one would get in a sleeper class compartment on the train journey to this place. The first variable was pretty well handled by a competent local cabbie and the journey ended up taking only 1:10 minutes of the alloted 3 hours.

Howrah is one of those huge stations that you love to travel from - well planned with 23 full sized platforms and 4 more planned with each set of 4 platforms has 2 service roads , so folks after the payment of a fee can *actually* alight next to their compartment (no there are no 'a' and 'b' type platforms as in the UK). It is the largest station that I have travelled from and I suspect one of the largest stations in India but no one seems to be able to confirm this suspicion.

Taking the train in a 2nd class sleeper compartment (for those who don't know what these are see the linked photograph though look at the compartment behind the kingfisher.) was an experience after nearly 8 long years . I had forgotten the experience of being seated in a heated tin-can with the sights and the smells of the country-side or urban area that you were going through. Ofcourse the fun bit was in the various cries of caffee cafee or chai jhai and looking out of the window seated in a forward facing seat ! The cheap thrills of looking out of the window on a curve in the tracks to spot the locomotive or the tail of the 24-25 compartment long train are unmatcheable. The company on this trip was a cute little kid who was hell-bent on teaching me ABCD and counting numbers from 1-100. This was interspersed by a few attempts to throw out the latest Frederick Forsyth novel that I was reading .

In the middle of this , the kid also managed to read the book by flicking through the pages, cheated on a spelling game and checked if I could spell G-A-P . Just when you thought that the temperature was reaching it's heights and you would continue to swelter it was time for a refreshing summer shower.

It's remarkable how many times nature manages to cool things down especially one when is going through a really hot summer afternoon, if it were the UK I would have cursed the rain given that we only seem to get a lot of it and it would surely interfere with my cricket game ! , but here it was fresh, pleasant and the smell of fresh rain on what had been a hot muggy and sweltering afternoon was extremely refreshing. The biggest advantage of travelling in a second class compartment is the ability to actually take in the weather, the sights and the smells of the places you go through. It can be tepid, boring and quite ghastly in some of the urban areas but that's all made up by the smell of the first rains hitting a parched ground but if you really want to travel through India there are no places better than a seat in a super-fast second class compartment with the odd forays to the door of the compartment to sit down and soak up the scenery. Soon enough it was time to alight the train at Jamshedpur to be welcomed by the gang of 5 who made sure that everyone at the station knew that I had arrived with garlands, placards, a homemade director of events and quite a few noisy statements .This sometimes begs the question - with friends like this .... I leave it as homework for the astute reader to finish ......

Of Trains ,stations and Railways..

In the last month or so , it's been awesome traveling by the railways across India and the UK in the course of trips .


1. The best station in India - in terms of scale and size Howrah ! It has close to 25 platforms and trains departing for particular regions of India will only leave from a cluster of platforms in this station. Cars can go right along the platform and literally drop you off in front of the coaches. There is enough space for parking on the sides and everything is on a gargantuan scale. I'd suspect that Chennai Central and NDLS will fit into Howrah , though CST might give a run to Howrah for its money because of the Victorian architecture.

2. The smallest station in India : Darjeeling. Everything is tiny about it. The platforms are like small steps on which you can climb. The rail track runs parallel to the roads and at many places traffic has to wait for the trains when they chug along. Probably also the most picturesque with the glorious Kanchenjunga as the backdrop . I would particularly recommend travelling on the toy train. For all ye growing up hearing about steam engines this is one of the few places where you can actually see it working . Look at the pic where you can see it filling up with water after a 6 km drive !

3. Cambridge Station - UK . It is probably true of stations in some of the smaller towns in the UK. When you enter the station you are told there are 4-5 platforms but there is no overbridge or a subway. There is one really long platform and this is further split into 4-5 platforms . There is a parallel track along side the track for the platform that has various entry points for the different regions in the platform. So it was very funny to be on the same physical platform but a different virtual platform ... If you get my drift.

Noise makers.

Alert readers (numbering in the double digits after discovery of a colony of readers in Australia) of my blog would remember an earlier post about our esteemed neighbour back in good ol' Madras. 6 a.m. is a time that one spots in Madras thanks to piping hot filter coffee made by the pater with freshly boiled milk and the so-called first decoction of the day. However it is also a time when the city slowly wakes up and there is peace in the world with absolute silence, the flowers blooming outside, birds chirping . At this point you remember Shri Nehru's statement about paradise et al and you wonder if something magical has happened to good old Madras. You feel benign reading the latest edition of the Hindu with that magical cuppa of steaming coffee and and your senses beginning to get into a state where they'd be raring to go .

However the trauma starts just about the time that you are finishing the last pages of the Hindu, the last drops of coffee are left in the tumbler and the trigger for this affliction of the senses is the sound of a car being unlocked using a remote. For those of the readers that are not savvy with respect to automobiles, these are devices that can perform central locking / unlocking and the automobile under question utters a squawk or two depending on the operation being performed . A survey conducted by yours truly (ratified by the mater's survey over the past 2 months) over the past 4 days has indicated a daily average of 20 squawks within 10 minutes which peters down to atleast 3 squawks an hour till 9 a.m at which point of time the misery alluded to in my previous post begins. The pater has a plausible theory about this device being used as a bell to summon the watchman at regular intervals from the gate to the house, a distance of a few feet ( order of 10 feet) . Ofcourse if this were a castle and the watchman sat at a distance of a few km you'd use this device to summon the watchman to do your bidding but 10 feet is probably the height of laziness.

Is the laziness quotient of TamBrahms increasing ?

The mile high grid lock and painting parabolas ...

So, we were chugging along merrily upto Surat on the London Mumbai flight of Jet Airways assisted by favourable tail winds that let us reach our milestone about 10 minutes in advance. I was impressed by the considerable skills shown by the pilot to paint conic sections up in the sky ably assisted in this activity by the air traffic controllers. Burning ATF over the Arabian Sea is a punishment meted out to aircrafts and passengers sitting in them by the enlightened few or na

It was impressive to note the ingenuity in the flight path which contained in the parabola from London Heathrow to Bombay a couple of ellipses, a triangle where a straight line would have done and curves along the z axis that resembled a spike equivalent to the most volatile day in the Bombay stock market. All the variations added to the parabolic curve were done in what would have been a distance of about 200 km from Bombay .

Well one would have heard and read about grid locks on roads, but if you want to see grid locks in the air you could start by flying into Mumbai or Chennai on an international flight. Now Pakoda Kadar suggests might be a bigger tourism business because people would fly helicopters to it. Now now , Pakoda don't forget the case of the golden egg laying goose being cooked !

On a wing and a prayer.

The headlines scream - Air travel in India is the next big thing after world peace. World war II pilots used to fly missions on a wing and a prayer describing a situation where they possibly ran out of fuel on the return legs to their bases or nursing their aircraft back to the base.

India's started building new airports and hopefully (when there is no ATF left or impossibly expensive to travel by air because of the increase in the costs ) these will be ready. Last week when one was on a Deccan flight from Chennai to Hyderabad the aircraft taxied on to the runway and prepared for the takeoff sequence. After going on 1/4th distance on the runway, the pilot braked hard, did a hard veer to the left and moved into the taxiway and went back around in the queue of planes to take off. No one knows what really happened beyond the ATC, the pilot and the staff. Sitting in the first row, yours truly was able to observe the stewardess give me a conspiratorial grin and then laugh away to glory and describe a story to her colleague about how it was possible that there was another aircraft attempting to land at the same time.

Reading an article in India Today about the chaos in airports one is really not surprised about seeing the current situation develop. Meanwhile 3 cheers for Laloo Yadav and the Railways.

The great tamilian rickshaw ripoff

Conversation

Me (near home) : Need to go to Spencers (about 6km away)
Autorickshaw guy: 75 saar
Me: 40 .
Autorickshaw guy: 65 saar ... too far.. Too many oneways Saar ..
Me :45 - 65 is too much for 6 km. and one ways are in your favour dolt.
A.G. : 60
Me: 45
A.G.: 55
Me: 50 . lets go

The same rickshaw driver to go to Adyar which is about 2 km from home will demand 40 bucks and have no clue about why he is asking that. When asked about this dichotomy he would say Spencer i will get savaaari (passengers) but then in Adyar I won't. I say "what splendid rot" , the rickshaws in Madras or Chennai as it should now be called are a bunch of rotten thieves, with meters as a show piece. Very recently I happened to be a part of a quiz where there were questions regarding Standard, Diamond, Ashoka and asking what linked them. I was one of the few who knew the answer thanks to the non-working meters of these auto rickshaws.

So one more cross for Chennai to bear and its great politicos now mulling over whether to start a BRTS or a Metro Rail similar to DMRC . I have been reading the papers with great interest about public hearings on the metro rail and the BRTS. First I say, do something simpler , fix autorickshaws with meters that work.

Go Goa !

Go Goa , or viva la Goa as you might put it in French ! Having heard a lot about how Goa is different from any other place in India , I'd decided that I would jump on the next opportunity to visit Goa which is exactly what I did on what was a hectic 3 day trip to Goa . The beaches are quite phenomenal with truly white and clean sand , no dirt, friendly people and very good water. We stayed at a place called Majorda and had a private beach to ourselves which was cool though we did visit Bagha and Calingute later at  night to see the public beaches. Goa parties like it is no one's business and 24 hours a day. When we were leaving Bagha to return to our hotel at 1 in the morning folks were still streaming in and all decked up to have a party . Just walking around and soaking the atmosphere was quite an experience in itself.

Driving to and from Goa was a novel experience given the fact that you had single lane'd roads for highway lined with trees, breathtaking ghats on either side of the road. But wait , what's the catch - buses and trucks and the odd Santro motoring along with what seemed to be single minded determination to run us off the road . Add to this motley crew a driver who thought himself to be the Indian version of Juan Pablo Montoya, a Toyota Qualis substituting the F1 car and the dirt track from Nippani to Sawantwadi in place of Imola and a whole car full of enthusiastic folks , you had the right ingredients for a heady time.

India Darshan and tortoises.

The conference in Kanpur was super cool for a variety of reasons including the talks that one got to hear from virtually the gurus of Computer and Compiler science :) . The other reason why Kanpur was cool was because of the weather. It is freezing cold in Kanpur , the sun rises at 6:45 in the morning and sets by 4:45 in the evening. By 5:30 its pitch dark and afterwards roaming outside in the cold weather is quite an act of bravery for a person not used to such cold dry climes. The wind is chill and hits you as though there are knives about in the air.

The train journeys to and from Kanpur were very interesting both of them were epitomes of why the Indian Railways will always remain very effective and punctual here and in the South of India but never in the North of India. The jury is still out on the East of India but looking at when trains from the North - East and the East arrive in Madras or even in Pune (atleast 8 hours late !) . Trivandrum - Guwahati 12 hours late. In any case while going forth self had a first a.c. ticket for a train known as Pushpak Express which was before time at all stations till the Rani of Jhansi started delaying it on its path to Kanpur with the result that it reached an hour late. Travelling in first class with a director of the railways (with whom I had rather interesting conversation regarding how good or bad the railways really were ) was an educational and comfortable experience with the attendants pretty much fawning on us. The return journey was by a train called the Awadh Express that comes all the way from Gorakhpur and comes to Bombay after almost going almost as far north as Delhi (it crawls through Agra so you might as well say thats close to Delhi) . So to come essentially south west as the crow flies , I was on a train that was going all the way around India by first going North , then west, then North West and finally south , south west and south east . This was also quite educational because this is when I learnt the virtue of patience and accepting a situation where one can never have enough.

So the travel continues...

Just about finishing work to leave for Kanpur to attend a compiler's conference at IIT Kanpur - its going to be cold and also a lonesome train journey after a long long time. Also getting a first class ticket thanks to there being no other direct way of getting there by air is going to prove to be some fun. Work's been hectic trying to figure out a way to sort out a GCC bug with the loop optimizers in making it generate better code for machines with zero overhead loop instructions.

So with all this it sure is going to prove to be a welcome break to smell the roses as they say !

Sawai Gandharva at long last.

After nearly 8 long years in the city of Pune finally found the time, energy to push myself to go listen to a concert in the Sawai Gandharva music festival. It was Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia playing the flute to a packed audience of nearly 15000 in a ground. People were somehow packed into the ground , sitting and standing and in odd positions . I heard the entire concert standing in an area where we were packed like the proverbial sardines in a tin can.

The master started with a raga in the hindustani mould (I forget its name other than the fact that it started with a J) , reached a crescendo with Vachaspati which is a raaga from Carnatic music featuring a jugalbandhi with the tabla which was awesome to hear. The final raga that he started playing as I left to pick my niece ( who decided to run for the Pune district at Ahmednagar) from the bus stop. was Pahadi. Having heard this in the past and knowing what magic it leaves with the listener I was quite loathe to leave the place but then duty called...

This really is one of the few things that I haven't enjoyed in Pune and finally even that has been completed.

Kashid Trip Slideshow.

This is a slideshow of photographs taken at Kashid post the trip to do the river rafting.