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Driving on Pune Roads

ankitagautam — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 07:41:50 +0000

Its been almost 6 months of me driving a vehicle, for the first time in my life. I never owned a vehicle before, although I have tried to ride few bikes and scooters. This was the first time I got to drive my two wheeler on a daily basis. It was indeed a learning experience, about how to drive and how others drive. I have made some observation of people on pune roads. These may be affected by my personal skills in driving.

1) Be very afraid of all the autowallahs on the road. They don’t follow any traffic rule and would expect you to not follow too. They take turns without giving indicators and lane driving is as alien to them as sub atomic physics. Their ego is too big and they can fight ferociously even if they took a reverse in a packed traffic jam without giving any gestural or digital indication. I strongly suggest you to not come in their way or conversation.

Similar observation can be made for 40 something uncles driving high end cars. With their costly cars, they might have bought the road itself. They will keep honking you to give them way, even if there is nothing in the way to go ahead. They’ll change lanes without indicating and drive at night with goggles on and head-lights on high beam!

2) People who are crossing the roads are very meek and fragile beings and you have to take the responsibility that they cross the road safely. You might as well consider them blind, deaf and dumb. They will look on the wrong side while crossing the road, wont ever pay any heed to the horn of your bike and might even stop in the middle of the road and change the speed or direction of their course. Before going ahead, you should make sure that they have crossed the road and now have no intention of returning back with an increased vigor.

3)Another category is guys belonging to 25-28 years of age, owning high speed bikes, driving without helmets and sometimes accompanied with the bent torso of a hot girl on their backseat. They are mostly harmless beings, they know how to drive and how to drive really fast. They won’t honk at you to give them side, they’ll twist, turn and make their own way around you. The only scary thing is you might lose your own balance when they are crossing you really fast.

4) And how can I forget the bus-drivers. Their bus is sometimes as wide as the road itself. And in the case of ravivar peth, the bus is wider than the road. In one particular street of ravivar peth when the bright red government bus arrives, pedestrians have to get inside the shops to avoid getting hit by the bus.

If the roads aren’t auto wallah’s property, they definitely are bus-wallahs’. If you see such a local bus around you, you better slow down your vehicle and take the right lane and stay away from them for our own good. You won’t realise when the bus changes the lane and stops near a bunch of restless people you would’nt have guessed to be a bus stop. Stay away, stay safe!

I might have be on the verge of paranoia because of the pathetic rush on the roads, but I have learnt my way well and my skills are constantly improving. And it feels nice to have written a post after such a long time!

Blasé

ankitagautam — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:37:22 +0000

There was a small creek that flowed almost all times of the year. Quite near to it, might be 200 steps away from its banks, was a small beautiful village of blase. There were around 100 houses in it and a big tree at the center of it where all the villagers would meet once a week to discuss and solve their internal problems. Since her childhood she has lived here and loved to. It had everything she ever wanted. She knew her way around it. There was plenty of water and fresh air to keep her healthy and happy. At sun rise she would wake up and start singing her favorite song that she wrote for her beloved. She would water the plants in the morning, go to work in the fields till noon and would spend her rest of the time at the bank of the creek writing new songs. She has followed the same routine since she was a teen. Although it got disrupted when she got in an accident last year. She was working in the field that day when it started to rain heavily. The thunderstorm blew away tops of various houses and many villagers suffered from pneumonia because of cold. It was a pretty horrible situation. She would have given anything to be a part of it. Instead she was in her field all alone singing and enjoying the rain unaware of the disaster it was causing in her village. When the rain was over and she was returning to her home drenched in water from top to bottom, it happened. the unfateful incident that she still prays in her nights that it didn’t happened.While walking through the muddy path, her foot slipped and she hit the electricity poll that stood tall by the village road. Her head hit first and the impact made her fall on the ground where was a glass piece amongst the pebbles and got into her left eye. She closed her eyelids as soon she hit the ground but the glass piece made its way to her eyeball nonetheless. Even today when she touches her scar she can feel the agony of the accident. But more than that she can feel the other things that she experienced due to the accident. She barely remembers people taking her to the hospital and doctors announcing that she wont be able to see from her left eye. She can clearly remember when her beloved looked at her for the first time after the bandages were taken out. She wanted his face to be the first thing she saw when her bandages were out. And now she wishes she asked for something else. may be she could have asked to see a flower first to thank mother nature for her recovery and her beloved saw her when she was sleeping and that horrified emotions that his eyes held when he first saw her would have gone unnoticed by her. When she looks at herself in the mirror she isn’t afraid by her face. Its not like she is an eyeless creature. There is very big scar on her face. which overshadows what used to be her eyelashes and her left eye moves with the right one. And only the people who know about the accident knows that her left eye is sightless which sadly is everyone in her village, it being a very small village. Now when she leaves her home in the morning, everyone in the street sees her. How she wishes they stopped looking at her. May be they looked at her everyday before the accident but it didn’t matter to her then. Now its not possible for to her ignore that. So she works in her field dull-ly. and waits eagerly for the noon when she goes to the creek side and sits there having her lunch. Earlier she had a spot fixed for her. Now she sits in a different place everyday.

She wonders how creek actually doesn’t have an identity of its own as that water she talks to changes everyday, the things its water contains are never the same and yet still it seems same to everyone because it flows in a definite path everyday. Sometimes she wonders how great it would be for her to go to a city and sit in an uptown coffee shop where no body knew what happened to her face and would think that may be she was made this way. This way when they talk to her, they wont be staring at her left eye. May be she will tell them herself that she cannot see from the left eye. She believes that they wont make a big deal out of it. Because they never knew that once she had a beautiful left eye. They will know her and may be like her for what she is now. And maybe she will ask someone to become her friend. That way she can make her friend meet her beloved and then three of them would sit near the creek side and sing some songs. Oh how she would love that.

The small creek looks at her everyday and reads her mind incessantly. It is amazed how her thoughts change everyday and she has new stories everyday and yet deep inside she is still the same person and will always be.

art and beauty

ankitagautam — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:08:13 +0000

i stare at a painting
and i listen to a song again and again
i saw a video and
it never got out of my mind
i read those words
and i was never the same again

there still are moments left
in my life of art and beauty

when i think
humans weren’t created just to get destroyed in the end

when i get older i will be stronger

ankitagautam — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:51:15 +0000

the first time i heard this line, the idea struck me, enlightened me with the faith that with the advancement of the age, i will be a stronger person, will have learned from my mistakes and will be ready to avoid or tackle them.

i am going to be 21 in a few months and when i look back at my 15 year old self i realize how naive i was and the innocent mistakes i did wont be repeated as i have learned the lessons. But my thoughts changed when i look at my self now and think about the times i was sad all day for nothing was going right and also the times when everything in the world crashed on me and i was still able to smile and feel happy to just alive. there is no connection of my responses to my problems with my age. surely the problems of teenage wont look as big enough now but there are and will be new problems which will look equally important at that point of time. but my responses will be more or less the same. definitely the way of tackling them will change but the sorrow and distress they provide will be same.

i am sure when i am 70 or 80, i’ll have days like these when nothing will go right and there will be days when i will smile in spite of the world crashing down on me.

we humans have a thirst of knowledge. since our birth we have been asking questions,searching for the answers. well the truth is there is nothing to know. cos there is not a possibility that you can ever know everything no matter how long you live, no matter how intense your search is going to be. we know this but we still keep looking for the answers, reasons, knowledge every second of our lives.

when you are 80 you will know as much about this world as you knew when you were 10 or may be just when you were born. so why dont we stop pursuing answers? cos as we advanced we came to know a little part of our brain which likes to keep itself active by hunting for things not known previously. this keeps us alive, thinking that we can do something in this world, change something, do something our way and know the possibilities.

or may be humans can stop asking questions and looking for reasons in everything that happens, leave this endless search and let the things just be, feel them, touch them and rejoice in their being.

but then the world will be a happy place which is not intended by its creator. and thats why we are mere humans.

maybe someday i’ll try doing this, stop my reasoning and feel the beingness and if i am able to do this and still think of writing about it here then believe me it will again be an act of letting you ‘know’

ankitagautam — Wed, 12 May 2010 14:47:02 +0000

Well, today is Wednesday and the coming 4 days are holidays (thurs-national holiday fri-leave sat,sun-weekend) and I am in this awesomely wonderful continent of Europe and the top most tourist destination in the world (read-PARIS, refer-wiki) is 2.5 hrs from where I am sitting right now. There is not a soul in 500 km of radius I can call a friend of mine. And everyone is going out and visiting famous European cities. And I dont feel like going anywhere, doing anything or talking to anyone. I think with the increase in age I am turning into this pathetic lazy person but frankly I dont remember myself being extremely cheerful about visiting new places or having a ‘good holiday time’. I have never gone to school trip/college trip. Since my childhood I have always been on holiday trips with my parents except the two trips in last one year and these two have been extraordinarily foolish and adventrous in the sense that I had no idea that I will go on a trip before 4 hours of sitting in a cab with two of my dearest and craziest of friends.

Family trips have been fun but though not always. In the last trip to southern India I had the worst fever of my life and was stuck in an unknown city for 4 days with 104 fever. Also my parents like to visit the colder places in summers-’the hill stations’ and I hate cold weather more than anything. I remember when we went to Bangalore Mysore and Ooty trip, I had to buy a sweater in Ooty and still I was shivering. That day I swore never to visit Ooty again.

But I don’t mind the extreme cold weather here because its usually warm inside the apartment and buildings and I don’t have to stay in the streets for more than 10 mins. But I hate planning to visit the places, searching for cheapest fares available and booking tickets online (its a lengthy and boring process, also these sites have the worst usability)

I might have a problem with traveling on holidays or may be I am an extremely lazy person or may be I have no enthusiasm left. Whatever may be the reason, I am in the middle of this awesome continent with no wish to travel around. At the end of these 2.5 months, if I don’t go out of this town, some people might say I wasted a wonderful opportunity and I can only reply that I have been doing the same since past 20 years.

ankitagautam — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:29:08 +0000

We are fools

Standing in a line

Waiting for our turn

Wishing we would be free

one day

Some day

but all this is a lie

You are already free

or you never will be

idlis and my hatred

ankitagautam — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:57:13 +0000

Those of you who are still looking for some sense in what I write, please dont read this.

Before entering bansal classes, I might have tasted idli 1/2 times that too in few ‘shadis’. So my experience with idli was almost nil. My first wild encounter with idli was in the form of weekly torture of our PG aunty at kota. She used to force-feed us(me and my pg-mates) with tastless mounds of rice and whatever(she used to stuff something in the core of idli) She was a punjabi and we never said no to any other dish she made. But we extremely hated her preparation of idli. So we protested to change the menu for that particular day of the week. She didn’t listen to us. We even saw her making parathas for her daughter while we were sitting in the dining room and eating her pathetic idli. So we decided to boycott lunch on the next same week day. Nobody touched the idlis aunty made. She even came and persuaded us. Being the headstrong we were, we rejected her appeal. This led to complete transformation of our aunty into a ‘ jagruk bhartiya nari’. She shouted at us in a way that can only go with a punjabi woman weighing 120 kg. The shouting was followed with tears dripping on her face and testifying that we were the culprits of this case. Needless to say, we finished her idlis that day and that every weekday of two years of our stay there.

But the hatred I developed for idlis there continued till my last visit to south India. First day at chennai, I ate the best idli of my life, but also it was the only tasty idli I had during the whole trip. That trip increased my hatred to the level that I asked my mum not to cook rice at home for a whole month.

Well you must be wondering why am I writing all this. Its because today I ate the second best idli of my life. It was the breakfast at subansiri mess. I had two of them. First one was cold and second one being from the fresh slot, was hot and little oily. And that made me wonder that idli is like dhokla but with no spices or the tasty yellow color.

Whose life is it anyway?!

ankitagautam — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:43:14 +0000

You say I’m not doing it well. You say my ways are inappropriate. You think I’m not dealing with my issues. You say I dont have the right to end it. But whose life is it anyway??

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.“

paulo coelho

The Alchemist

Mama-mia

ankitagautam — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:26:20 +0000

This sunday we again ordered ‘Mamamia-Say Cheese’. If you are wondering what does that mean, you probably have never eaten Papa John’s Say Cheese Pizza. In such a case, I strongly suggest you to stop reading this blog right now and order that sinful mouthwatering delight which is so aptly named-’Say Cheese’. Although while eating it we don’t ‘say’ or speak anything(all the focus is on the eating) every bite of it is filled with cheese and it is awesomely yummy. Best ‘all cheese’ pizza of my life.

Half mamamia(5 slices) plus one pepsi made my sunday awesome. I might sound like a food-a-holic but yea its true, a pizza is sufficient enough to lift up my spirits and make me happy I have eaten so many say cheese pizzas from papa john’s , I don’t even remember the count.

Also, this saturday we had exotica-cheese filled crust at Pizza hut and believe me these two pizzas have been the highlight of my weekend. Pizza hut of Guwahati is far better than the Bangalore ones. Its less crowded over there, pizzas are tastier and the type of music is within tolerance limit. Yea the vengaboys they play is really better than kannada radio fm over here.

Another thing I didn’t like was the chairs. There was a big rush and after half an hour of waiting we got seated on ‘chairs’. I love sitting on those comfy sofas. That is how food is supposed to be eaten- relaxing on sofas, eating pizzas and ready to fall asleep any second.

Why do they have CHAIRS at food joints!!!

Seriously, you are still reading this blog?? There is no story, no philosophy, nothing remotely sensible for intellectuals like you. Its all about pizzas and other delicacies God made to keep humans happy.

This wordpress is a very nice platform for people like me to write things like this. And so I take great pleasure in introducing a new term for grouping a large number of people for the sake of easy identification. Here I give you- ‘Pizza Person’

Its pretty simple,whoever ‘loves’ pizza is a pizza person. And by ‘loves’ I mean a serious relationship with that oven baked cheese tossed bread. A ‘one-dinner-stand’ will not do. There are going to be only two things- Pizza Person OR Not a Pizza person,, nothing in between, you have to decide you are in love with pizza or not .You cant be like- It doesn’t really matter,I can eat pizza sometimes-NO-You have to totally fall in love with pizza to be a Pizza Person.

If you are reading this blog and you are ‘not-a-pizza-person’, I want to express sorry for the loss your tastebuds are suffering. And to all my fellow Pizza People: stay tuned for more on Pizzas, Pizza outlets, fundaes and faltu bakar like this blog.

Keep Eating!! Keep Njoin!!

urs,

njoinlife

ankitagautam — Fri, 29 May 2009 10:43:18 +0000

We were returning from office. It was a lucky day cos we found seats in the bus but they were apart.. I got a seat in one of those facing compartments of bus where you have to sit with a stranger beside you and two strangers in front of you (I recall this from one of the bus design presentations we had in iitg that motive of such seats is to increase interaction between passengers)
but in reality I realized, I’ll have to bear the people in front staring at me because there is nowhere else to look and in return I’ll av to stare at them.

A middle aged aunty sat beside me.. her smile was quite friendly. She tried to say something in kannada which I couldn’t understand. May be that was just a conversation starter which ended as quickly as it started. In front of the aunty, a kannada girl of my age was sitting.Her conscious seemed to wander in space and her eyes were repeatedly looking at her cellphone. Beside her sat two kids,the center of all my attention. The boy was around 7 yrs old and the girl was around 5 yrs old..

The siblings were sharing a seat and the brother had his arm around his sister and was showing her the things outside the bus window and telling something in kannada which obviously I couldn’t understand. But I could see that the brother was trying to answer each and every query of his lil sis. Then after some question which I wasn’t able to understand and an answer I couldn’t decipher d brother kissed lil sister’s forehead and said something very cutely. After a while they started arguing also and had a little fight.
They started staring at me because of my constant attention to them, girl asked something,boy answered something I knew they didn’t like me looking at them so I started looking outside the window, I remembered my childhood days.. the trips me and my elder brother had.. the kisses on my forehead, the fights we had the things he taught me, the gifts I forced him to give me, the pencil box of mine he used as ash tray, the endless talks about his college and my school, the scoldings, the blackmailings, the guitar he gifted from his first salary, the pathetic guitar lessons I gave him, the dal batis
he prepared for me, the coffees I made for him,, and the most recent ones like the late night talks on the phone about his office and my college and I wondered how such a great distance which exits between us doesn’t allow me to have his shoulder wen I feel like crying and my forehead doesn’t get his kisses and still I know he is there for me, he has always been there for me and will always b there..
That little sister and brother made me once again feel the love and recall the moments with my brother.. and I know he will travel the whole night to be here on my birthday.
.. He has been with me on my all 19 birthdays.. And I’ll sit with his arm around me and he will show me the Bangalore city and will answer my every question on the way..