Here Comes The *SUN*

As Mumbai was in the brick of an zombie apocalypse caused by incessant rains in more animated words –“raining blue whales and brochiosauruses” and filtered sun rays through dense almost opaque clouds.. to save the day, oh no the month, humanity.. came the sun! The pale mumbaikars who had started limping and looking for dry roads stared into the warm rays like they were stunted by the warmth.. a whole month ie 30days..ie 720 hours ie 43200 mins ie 2592000secs ie 2.592X10^9 micro-secs ie.....

In came the blissful excited protons (rays) piercing through the clouds proving whose the boss of the skies and shooting right over the morbid grey port hole riddled roads and waterlogged rail tracks. A few more days and i bet on my happy soul that there would have been a zombie outbreak.. with commutators waddling through knee deep water  and infecting others by just looking at them.. their damp clothes that refuse to dry clinging to their bodies which have gone pale, leathery and wrinkled due to the absence of vitaminD and constant osmosis taking place.. it would have been zombieland revisted!

May be i speak too soon. Hopefully the sun comes and stays for a day or two. Cause it wont be long before i start missing the splashing about dirty water and complaining about truckloads of rain!

PS: when you have nothing to talk, talk about the weather. 

kuch ehsaas yuhi...

the limitlessness

Pighle neelam sa behta ye sama,
neeli neeli si khamoshiyan,
na kahin hai zameen na kahin aasmaan,
sarsaraati hui tehniyaan paattiyaan,
keh raheen hai bas ek tum ho yahan,
bas main hoon,
meri saansein hain aur meri dhadkhanien,
aisi gehraiyaan, aisi tanhaiyaan,
aur main...sirf main.
Apne hone par mujhko yakeen aa gaya.

-zindagi na milege dobara

ganpatibappa moriya!!!!!

Believe in gods or not, one always gets a holiday which is very generous of the gods! With  september on the calender it's the beginning of two month long festivities! Starting from ganpati to durga puja clubbed with navaratri, dassera then comes diwali and bhai duj and ends knocking on the doors of exams!

visarjan at juhu

But nevermind that! It's ganesh chathurti and whole of Maharashtra is in high spirits for the next 10 days, with occasional visarjans in an interval of 2-3 days (polluting the already polluted water of juhu) but its fun! college goes on a mini vacation mood.. (not that it makes much of a difference!) if it takes someones fancy you could stand in the legendary "lal bagh cha raja's" line which snakes kilometeres and often takes 4 hours to just to get darshan! But yeah, people can get crazy over here.You witness ganpati of varying sizes.. right from as small as your index finger to a 20ft tall one and it doesn't end with size, different postures of the elephant-man. Even expressions our hard to go unnoticed! And not to miss on the delicious "modaks" made on this occasion and all kind of sweets (it seems ganpati had quite a sweet tooth!) Somehow this cute trunk-man with an equally cuddle-able  mouse has captured the hearts of people since the concept of the tusker-man originated.

Mean while, let mumbai go on a gajadhar frenzy while i laze around and yes, get crushed in the crushing crowd of devotees and non-devotees and people like us who are out enjoying the spirit of festival rather than the belief!

GANPATIBAPPA MORIYA!!! JAI MAHARASHTRA! (no i am not going political!) 

Tales of the rain..

A mumbaikar would have the best of the stories to offer to you about rains. And here is one from me.

As litres of water poured over us with raindrops the size of bucketful of water it rained. It was like the monsoon had just begun at the end of the official end of rains. Overjoyed people danced and wet themselves in this blessed shower. All where smiles until the waterfall from above continued and people’s smile wrinkles shifted to the temples to worry wrinkles.
 But we college folks live in our own world. As the lecturer chattered on people had him on mute and stared out of the window to the rain. After an hour of watching this usual silent movie we all rushed out  of the class to hear the inevitable news that trains are late or blocked or stuck and so on. Immediately there were plans of staying at friends place or round about ways of reaching home. So anyways all anyone needed was an excuse to bunk. A mass bunk declared all set off for the mission “reach home”. With some fortune we got a train bound home.
Picking up a friend on way, off  we went braving the rains. After a struggle which equals to like getting water in desert we managed an auto from station. Some  higher power thought it was too good to be true and our auto got stuck in calf deep water somewhere in the colony no nearer to our home. So descending down the muddy water(thanks to the hills all around) we trudged through the water. And the thrill! It looked like hot chocolate oozing from all around!(reminded me of willy wonka’s chocolate factory!) Sloshing through the gutters into the sidewalk and road.. seemed like river flowing  all around. With heavy rains pouring all over us and cat wet  to the skin atlast reached home like a soldier returning from the battle.. my sweet ma is just too sweet to greet me with pleasantries. She was  suspicious of me jumping through all the rain water and river lutes (i am not denying i didn’t!) But i had this smirk of victory which was probably the reason for all the steam off. Cons of all this was my bag had become a water storing camel hump wetting everything inside. And its a pain to dry it all. But hey! It was a hell of an experience!

PS: always follow your instincts if it says wear sandals and not shoes. Do so! Cause its going to rain on that god damn day and soak everything!

that my dear friends, is how it rains! 

net of hope

Dots on clear canvas of water..

Braving the vastness i sail...

I sail for hunger, for the love of sea..

As my net of hope descends gracefully

Entrapping a dome of dreams as it touched the wrinkled water..

I pray... i pray for enough to feed the many mouths

To see the honey smiles for the tiny gifts i bring

With a twist and tug i pull the catch of wriggling wishes

A death of one linked to the life of the other...

I fish the catch and march into the din of noise....

And again its dawn

As the sun shines a new light

I set out for the sea with my net of hope.....

veiled sadness.....

.

a veiled face, a burqa clad women..

 the gesture of surrender.. the heavy sigh as she leans over on the framework of the over-bridge.. through the hidden veil flows her tears...none notice, none care.... among all the amputed and time wrinkled beggars she stood out... faceless she was but even then she emitted a great misery... all lost, helpless...i wanted to reach out for her, comfort her..but like many others i rushed towards the platform.. like all the drones going for work i headed out for college.. but she was on my mind all the while.. a tremor, a defeated shrug , like all that was warm seeped out ... it was valentines day.. a celebration of love.. are we so blind and selfish that we choose to ignore the distress calls??.. is valentines day just celebration with your loved one and not the collective same species love... more refined way is humanism?!.. chuck valentine day and all the rubbish of love in the air, if one cant empathise or be compassionate....

VEINED MUMBAI....

What does one write for his/her first ever blog and post?! So after a lot of thought on what should be my first post I zeroed it down to my everyday life experience....

So to start from the beginning of all the beginnings.. i have lived all my life (well most of d part) in a colony big enough to accommodate few thousands. The place is like what central park is to New York...blissfully cradled in womb of nature away from the hustle bustle but still very much part of the city .. Its like a modern day self-sufficient village.. well not being a frequent goer in the city i have always marvelled of how people travel in the Mumbai’s famous trains... yes.. this post  is about  the very lifeline of the city TRAINS and me a tiny speck in all those crowded heads while i surge or rather flow on with the human tide...

I travel to college by trains... yes me .. which i would have thought quite impossible had someone asked me a few years back.. but if u have stayed in Mumbai and haven’t been on trains its like you are a Christian and haven’t  been baptised.. allow me first to sketch you a visual of how local trains look in Mumbai during the peak hours. They are slender metal boxes with discoloured peeling paint and paan stains all over the sides like the paint was meant to be that way!! .... looking at the very structure makes you wonder at the strength of the metal used... and when they are filled or rather stuffed with human bodies they look like overstuffed sandwiches with the fillings bulging from the sides at a point of time that they might drip and fall...so this is roughly how the trains look when they arrive at the station to fill in more people in  their  already stuffed compartments... now my narration would like to take you to the inside of these modern day voluntary torture chambers.. when ones eyes rest on such a scene as that, one often wonders of what’s the highest compressibility a human body can endure?! Puts a huge question mark on the limit of endurance! So here we are in a crammed up compartment with people of various strata's of the society scuffling, standing ,sitting, hopping ,meditating on one leg (ah yes, space crunch does that) . It’s amazing, really, the sense of understanding people develop when one is subjected to something that extreme .. even after a time you start enjoying it.. i know that sounds weird but believe me, when the trains are empty you feel like some vital part of the train is missing! Its hard to express the magnitude of unknown brotherhood that one experiences if you are a daily train passenger..u start smiling and recognise faces over the months of travels by the same local.You even make friends with people you would generally not do so...the throwing about and elbowing of bodies which usually takes place whenever a station arrives, the uncomfortable proximity, somehow  gets you connected, a mutual understanding with utter strangers is glimpsed on such situations which was plain freaking the 1^st time i boarded the trains!i apologised for every foot i stamped, every elbowing and pushing about i did! But as time passed realisation dawned that no one really minds being rowdy on trains was the key to getting down on time for your stop....  i am sure this is the same with all the the overly crowded metro cities of india given the facility of trains and metros!

Travelling in these trains gives oneself ample opportunity of observing .. learning, understanding the   amazingly different kind of people that have been blessed to grace these congested pieces of match boxes... life without trains for a mumbaikar is nightmarish... it like Paris without metro!

I often visualise  trains in the city as blood vessels.. they are the carriers of oxygen in this case humans to different areas.... sleek ,flexible, highly networked and efficient(to some extent) they are lifelines of the city without which travelling would be unimaginable...

On the concluding note i would praise the engineers behind those construction of fabulous hell carriages (makes even charon’s* fleet of carrier of dead look shamefully petite!)which till date haven’t given up my exploding through the sheer strain it goes through... the last thing i would ever want to be is a Mumbai local! But one of the many things without which this city of dreams would be incomplete...

                                                

*charon- greek mytho character,the ferryman of the dead