The last two lines are the key.....I will be back


I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning, my pilot, sits;
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;

Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead;
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardors of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of Heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,
As still as a brooding dove.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,
May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees,
When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,
Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone,
And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl;
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,--
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-colored bow;
The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove,
While the moist Earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.

~ P.B. Shelly

The Jet Airways flight 841 smoothly took off from Kamaraj Domestic airport at 17:20 hours on 25th August.
And I, pressing my face close to the window, saw the great sprawl of Chennai, as the plane gained altitude. Those little houses, roads like a slender black band and the railway tracks, slivers of steel, and the trains looking just like those magnificent toy trains that I used to see, and crave for, everytime I visited the Nehru Children's Museum.
Then the plane banked, and left the city and the land behind and we were flying above the blue waters of the Bay of Bengal.

And I was wishing that I was on a concorde jet so that I could travel faster than sound and be home in under an hour.

Gradually the day began to wane, the brilliant sunlight that had bathed the jetliner became more mellow, and looking out I was almost thinking that how pleasant it seemed on the wing..which was bathed in the light of the setting sun, as if the sunlight was trying despately to hold on to its territory against the darkness.

In reality it was minus 51 degrees outside and the plane was at its cruising altitude of 31000 feet. Now thats a lot higher than Mount Everest.

And as the plane neared Calcutta, I was treated to an amazing sight, of the sky in colours red, crimson, blue, indigo and black. The sky to my right was black, the eastern sky long forsaken by the sun. The western sky was a transition from darkness to light, as the daylight moved westward. Ahead of me the Northern sky was darkening while behind me there was some lingering crimson light.

Then suddenly I saw, through the breaks in the clouds, little stars twinking below me. Had we reached so high that we wree above the sky?
Not at all. It was the welcome sight of little lights glowing thousands of feet below me. Like fireflies. We were now over the Southern part of Bengal.

The I could feel the plane descending and suddenly we were below the clouds. And the city of Calcutta ablaze in all its halogen and neon lit glory lay sprawled below me. Like a giant nebula.
And graduallt they became more distinct, the orange glows of the street lamps, the darting glows of autobile headlights...

And then there was a light bump as the plane touched the runway.

Calcutta, was just like Calcutta. Nothing had changed.

It is the gauge less travelled, the metre gauge. Despite having a natural affinity for anything that runs on rails, I hardly have enough memories of journeys on India’s once extensive metre gauge rail network.

The few that I have, are scraps and snippets from journeys made in Tamil Nadu. The first journey was on the night train from Madras Egmore to Chidambaram. I remember that we travelled by bus to the station and the conductor was busily whistling away at every stop and shouting out its name, I remember that I was surprised to find that the coaches were narrow and there were no side berths and I was overjoyed that an electric engine was pulling us.

What I don’t remember is the reason for sleeping through the entire journey. It has never happened to me on a train- I am sleepless on tracks.

I remember waiting at Trichy station for a train to Madras- the Rock Fort Express. The train was not due for a while and I dragged my dad from one end of the platform to another, to see the tracks, the signals and the engines. What I saw did not impress me much- I was partial to the electric traction; diesel engines and semaphore signals seemed to be grossly inferior. Of course at that time I did not know that Trichy was home to the terrible twosome- Atticus and Nerd.

Today these very things are slowly being phased out. Metre gauge is being replaced by broad gauge. The train that Feluda boarded from Ramdevra while in pursuit of Mukul’s kidnappers in "Sonar Kella" or "The Golden Fortress" was a metre gauge train; today it is broad gauge. In the movie the train was hauled by a steam engine called "Fort of Jaisalmer"; that engine has probably been broken up and sold as scrap. Today the train is hauled by a diesel engine.

The Semaphore signals are giving way to the automated signals. The YAM 1 electric locomotive is history and the YDM’s are soon to follow suit.

All this is being done in the name of modernising the railways and still it takes 32 hours to reach Bombay from Calcutta. Atrocious!!

Now let me come back to the metre gauge. My most memorable journey has been on it. And it was quite a journey.

1987. Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, MG Ramachandran had passed away and the entire state had dissolved into a delirium of grief. Schools and colleges closed, shops downed shutters and buses and trains stopped plying. All over TN people were pouring kerosene and setting themselves on fire, grown men were crying like babies and women were getting hysterical with grief.

At that time we were stranded at Tirupati, yours truly having had his head tonsured just a day earlier. We were scheduled to go to Pondicherry, but found that all buses and trains to TN had been cancelled. All except one. So my dad and my uncles had an emergency meeting and decided on a change in itenary- we would go to Rameshwaram instead.

And I was overjoyed because instead of an abominable bus journey there would be a long train journey. I was too little at that time to be bothered about events outside my world of trains, colour crayons, Enid Blyton and football.

So we began the journey. The train was hauled by a now extinct steam engine and I must confess I liked the "chug-chug-chug….toooot" sound. It was different from the sophistication of the electrics but very melodious. So we gently moved on along the countryside. At a town called Chittoor my dad and uncles got down to buy food. "Nothing would be available in TN", they said. Just as dusk was falling, the train trundled across a bridge over some electrified tracks- they were the mainline tracks from Madras to Coimbatore; of course I did not know it then. Just after that train passed through a big town and pulled into a brightly lit station. It was the town of Vellore. However the platforms were empty, you could count the number of people with the fingers in one hand.

After that the train chugged along cutting through the dark countryside, courtesy a new moon night. I kept my face pressed on the window bars, feeling the balmy evening breeze and soon enough a fleck of cinder flew and landed in my eye.

The irritation seemed never to end, and in that state I fell asleep.

Morning saw me wake up as the train pulled into Kumbhakonam station. Then it pulled into the town of Trichy and at midday into Madurai. All the while I was either gazing out of the window or playing with my cousins.

The best part came at the end.

Late in the afternoon the train pulled out of a station. I didn’t know it was Ramanathapuram. Then my uncle informed us that soon the train would pass over the Pamban Bridge, which spanned a channel in Palk Bay linking Rameshwaram Island with the mainland.

A bridge over the sea seemed so much more exciting and adventurous than one over a mere river; so all of us crowded around the windows.

The train soon entered a sandy strip of land and we started getting glimpses of the blue sea through the palm trees.

Then it pulled into Pamban station and our coach was invaded by a large group of men clad in black- Aiyappas on their way to offer prayers at Rameshwaram. The noisily boarded the train and promptly occupied all the vacant seats and even the overhead berths and filled up the coach with their cacophonous rapid-fire chatter. Of course, their arrival completely unnerved some of my aunts who probably mistook them for railway bandits or something else.

We kids were least concerned, our seats by the windows were safe.

And the train moved on leisurely along that sandy strip of land that gradually tapered as we approached the bridge. The sea approached closer and closer and finally all the intervening palm trees vanished and we were passing along a sliver of sand with the blue waters on either side and a strong wind blowing through the coaches.

Then we found ourselves on the bridge.

For a moment it was an anticlimax, but only for a moment. The entire scene was breathtaking; the blue-green water far below, breaking up into foamy turbulence at the piers, the strong sea-breeze and the rocking motion of the train, which from the windows seemed to be hanging in mid-air over the waters.

The bridge was an open one, and so the train passed at a snails pace. It only added to the charm. We were all riveted to our windows; even the Aiyappas had fallen silent and were looking out.

It seemed that the bridge would never end, so slow was the train; but soon we left it and entered another sliver of sand, and then further on into Rameshwaram town itself.

The town did not interest me much. The beach was dirty and the place nondescript. Only point of interest was the temple corridor, which is the longest among all temples. A trip to Dhanushkodi, a ghost-town at the tip of the island, half buried under the sand after it was abandoned following a cyclone, was planned, but I could not go owing to a bout of indigestion. Years ago, the railway line went upto this place, ending at a jetty from where ferries crossed the sea to Sri Lanka. After the disastrous cyclone of 1964, the town was abandoned and so was the railroad.

Two days later we returned. And the journey over the Pamban Bridge was just as exciting.

Note: YAM1, YDM4

Locomotives used in Indian Railways have a system of classification that goes like this-

First letter indicates the gauge; W for broad gauge, Y for metre gauge and Z or N for narrow gauge.

Second letter indicates the power; A for AC Electric, C for dual voltage (locomotives running on both AC and DC traction, these can only be seen in Mumbai and it adjoining areas) and D is for diesel.

Third letter indicates the type of traffic; P for passenger traffic, G for goods and M for mixed (both passenger and freight)

The number indicates the series, like WAM 1 was the first class of electric locomotives and after it came WAM 2, WAM 4 etc.

Old steam engines used to be classified as WP, YP etc.

Gauge is the distance between the centre lines of the two tracks. IR has a broad gauge of 1676 mm, a metre gauge of 1000mm and two types of narrow gauges of 760 and 610 mm. Europe and USA have standard gauge (1440 mm). In India the only standard gauge tracks are those of the Calcutta Tramways.

 

I am standing in the no-mans land between a student and a professional. No more studies, no more exams. I am surprised that these academic issues should continue to bother me; after all I hardly ever studied over the past 2 years…or for that matter since my ICSE exams. But somehow it still feels strange to know that now I wont be having to remove books from the shelf, wipe off that thin layer of dust and then with an effort start reading in a desperate last minute pride salvage operation.

 

It was fun…. those late-night-last minute cramming sessions. In school I used to be the typical good-boy who used to have his syllabus covered a week or worse a month before exam…and so there was hardly anything challenging in getting decent scores. However in those days academic excellence was not something I used to look at with nonchalant abandon. Maybe if I had pursued higher education in geography, as I had wanted to way back in school, I would have remained a studious guy. Right now all that is the recent past…not yet matured enough for me too look back fondly and wistfully say to myself…”Well, those were the days.”

Then why am I sounding so wistful about all these matters academic? I guess it’s the lingering after-effect of reading R K Narayan’s “The Bachelor of Arts”.

 

That’s what I am doing right now, reading as voraciously as a silkworm eating mulberry leaves. First it was the world of Helen Huntingdon in Wildfell Hall. Then came the world of little Scout and Jem, trying to get Boo Radley out, and Atticus with his advice, “Kill all the bluejays if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Then came a journey with “Sons and Lovers”…another foray into the writings of D H Lawrence. After that a fling with the “Interpreter of Maladies”, then with “Swami and Friends” by the Saryu River and now I find myself reading Mario Puzo’s “Fools die”.

 

I am also going out for long walks. Out of my house, a right and a left and into that vast playground. In the evenings it resonates with the sound of children teenagers playing cricket or football, the elderly sitting on those bamboo benches and talking about their lives and their good old days and mothers bringing their tiny tots to play. However at that hour the vast expanse is a medley of mercury vapour light, shadow and darkness in the evening while a gentle cooling breeze sweeps the area planting long lingering kisses on my brow as if tempting me to stay back. The vast ground is silent and deserted, only a few late evening walkers and a few couples sitting in the benches where the shadows have elbowed out the halogen lights; and amidst all this one can hear the steady hum of the gnats. The playground is full of memories as numerous as the innumerable blades of grass.

I cut through the ground and another right brings me to my school, that lovely place where I spent twelve glorious years. And as I walk by and see the familiar sights, now a study in light and shade, it seems as if someone has turned back time and taken me back to the old days again.

Briskly walking along the main road, and turning right from the Labony Estate traffic island, I come to that little Kali temple, where the evening puja draws a huge crowd of devotees, some standing inside with folded hands while others remain on the pavement. I pause for a while, say a little prayer and then move on to walk past a particular building in FD Block.

After that I have no fixed route. Sometimes I walk all the way till the statue of Netaji. At other times I take a turn and go past the City Centre Mall, a blaze of bright neon lights, parked cars, couples sitting close to each other on the steps, families out on a shopping trip and a little distance away the vendors selling mouth-watering phutchkas, bhel puri and other street snacks.

 

Life is a long walk along a crowded tree-lined street. As you enter one, the trees and the people and everything else are the future, as you walk past they are the experiences and once you have left the road to enter another lane, they become memories.

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,
Thy tribute wave deliver:
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.

Flow, softly flow, by lawn and lea,
A rivulet then a river;
No where by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.

But here will sigh thine alder tree,
And here thine aspen shiver;
And here by thee will hum the bee,
For ever and for ever.

A thousand suns will stream on thee,
A thousand moons will quiver;
But not by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.

~Lord Tennyson

 

 

Not waxing lachrymose now, just two years in this place and it has been one great ride in the whirligig of life. Moments of joy and sorrow, triumph and tribulations, hope and despair, the sublime and the ridiculous; the good, the bad and the ugly…have seen and experienced it all here.

 

Heaven is a place on earth (where it is, we shall hopefully find someday), but not in Joka and Utopia is in the realm of dreams. Shall I say that my Alma Mater is like a diamond, where a tiny flaw imparts a special colour and makes it all the more precious and rare? No, not really… This is but an ordinary place, full of flaws and yet so beautiful all the same.

 

In the end, no matter what, IIM Calcutta has been one extraordinary once-in-a-lifetime experience.

 

This is the place where I tentatively stepped in one murky and rainy afternoon in June. Twenty-two months later, I leave this place a happy man. Here I made some great friends- Atticus, Shashank, Lakesidey, Nerdy, Pucci, Kapil and Anil to name a few. I realized a childhood dream of big time quizzing with BBC University Challenge, thanks entirely to Anil’s confidence in me. Went abroad to UAE for my summer internship- a stint in the Arabian Desert that turned out to be a pivotal moment in my life. And in the end, I did manage to salvage my grades and get a decent job.

 

However the most important thing that I gained here is love. This is the place where I met her, my classmate in primary school, a time when I was so shy that I never managed to summon enough courage to talk to her. We were out of touch for 15 years and then, thanks to batchmates.com and yahoo messenger, we met each other. Since then we have had a amazing journey together; she being my pillar of strength throughout my stay in this institution, holding my hand and pulling me back from the brink when I was in danger of falling, worrying and caring for me in times of sickness and sorrow and showering me with a tender love and affection.

 

I am glad that I came here. Always wanted to be here and now I leave without any regrets

 

And I hope you have realized that I have no intentions of ending my blog. This is my space, my Nitid Notebook and it can never die as long as my mind is alive. To be very honest, I expected that all of you would realize the significance of a post on 1^st April!!