the heat is on

summer's here.

The sky's turning this vivid blue you get only peak summers - in Lucknow and Allahabad. Or an airplane window. What happened to the smog? I need some sun cover, man.
Even the clouds have this slightly dreamlike hard blazing whiteness - haven't seen this color for a while. It's going to be a tough summer. Already too hot to even sleep in the trains.

Scenes and the City - Gurgaon diary

The first thing you feel is the dust. Heat and dust. Smell it, feel it, taste it... dryness. Open fields. The scent of the plains.

It's 9 pm and I'm on my balcony, breathing it in. Gurgaon gives this sense of wide, open spaces, open sky. Huge dark spaces beyond the halogen glare, streaks of light on the highways. The heat is like a hammer in the daytime, a swaddling blanket at night. This city lives on air-conditioning and cars.

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Faraway thump of a party in progress. Slim young women in salwars and sneakers doing the daily constitutional at 40 mph around the sprawling society, and some not so young, some not so slim.

Talking of the women - they're taller, fairer, and definitely pretty, but also... a little scarier. I prefer the Bombay girls - somehow they look approachable. Friendlier, maybe, but that's just cultural bias talking, I guess.

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And the cars. Bigger, flashier, and definitely scarier. Average speed, at this time, doesn't drop under 80, and every significant road is a six-lane highway. Signals, turns, pedestrians and other cars be damned. Classic kodak moment - flicking my eyes from the dashboard (100 kmph) over the driver's shoulder, out on the road, and there's a Santro cruising past, the driver giving me the most nirvana-encased look of utter, peaceful boredom. When you overtake, you don't look around, behind, ahead.

Just Do It.

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Step inside and the AC takes you into it's fist and squeezes - but it's a short gasp, then your skin cools and you're happy again. Not like Bombay, where the sweat would have given you the shaking chills; there is no sweat here.

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Switch on the TV, and there's a Komal Chautala lookalike, in uniform, selling inverters. She makes a reappearance on every break. I see why the next day - almost every 20 minutes, the lights flicker, and I feel more than hear a subterranean thump of the industrial inverter kicking in. There's a rising whine, lights return, accompanied by a faraway thrumming. Rinse and repeat.

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Everyone has their own water arrangements. My friend has six sintex tanks on the roof. During the day, the water is close to boiling point - so what if you want to have a bath? O ji, no problem. Open the freezer, take out one of two pre-frozen bottles of water, drop it in, and ten minutes later you have a nice, cool bucket.

Necessity is the mother of the most innovative invention.

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The construction levels that are happening are crazy. Giant mountains of steel and glass leaping out of the earth overnight, and the air and roads are choking on their afterbirth, piles of rubble, dirt, and floating dust. If the city had a tachometer, the needle would be well into the red.

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At night, you can feel a vibration, a hum, so deep-seated it's sensed almost at a spiritual level - an explosive, uncontrollable, pushed-to-the-max howl of growth. The future's going to be quite eventful.

Scenes and the City - Train Diary

the saga continues...

Are you lonely? Do you want some company? Some friends to keep you happy? Just go to Asangaon. Every Tom, Dick and Harry will be there. As instructed.

And you thought the King was dead. Photographic evidence that Elvis is alive and well, and apparently living in Borivali.

Gang members of today, a cross-section.
Big F. (as in, the ice-cream?)
Hawk (Hudson, -eye, or a GI Joe action figure?)
Frod (half a hobbit)
Aniks (an inside-out Skinner?)
Panzer (Auf wiedersehen, mein herr!)
Saiggy (better than capri, viri, libri, or aqui, I guess)
rushhh (Hi, Paula!)
Fighter (not Lover?)
M@K (makes it possible)
Venom (the Green Goblin will return in the next sequel)
Eros (Regal was running housefull)
Nemesis Harry (you mean Voldemort? Or puberty?)
Ohhh (Aahh. Ouchhh.)
KK (the result of outsourcing white-supremacist bigotry)
Lee (arrey bhai, kiski?)
Ladies and Gentlemen, the WTFs.

Scenes and the City, Episode 3

Music is passe. Coconuts Rock!! Welcome to Deep Purple Daab.

Or is it a brilliant below-the-line grassroots-level marketing strategy to wean the average man-on-the-street away from competing bands? If yes, what's next?

Van Halen vada pao?

Scorpions sandwiches?

Pink Floyd pani puri? or Bon Jovi bhelpuri?

Kid Rock Kathi rolls?

Music may be food for the soul, but looks like food is becoming the soul for music as well.

Scenes and the City, Episode Two

The train.

Ubiquitous, inescapable, inevitable, essential, infamous, embracing, pervasive... Mumbai is the local. The local is Mumbai. Books have been written on them, movies made, songs sung... as long as you're in Mumbai, you're in the train. One way or another. You'll travel in them, close deals, make plans, dream, sleep, make friends, meet that one person you've been searching for all your life, come face-to-face with your worst enemy, risk your life hanging literally by your fingertips, experience that sublime relaxation of the corner window facing direction in the shade... you'll go for treks, you'll make friends, cut vegetables, pray, sing, play music, listen to music, read, sleep, dream, sometimes even take a dump, argue, chat... you won't escape. Not them, never. They're as much your life as the clothes you wear.

It begins like a wildebeest migration on the Serengeti, when over a million bodies pass through one narrow pass every hour, not seeing, not thinking, just one giant mindless swarm, a herd, moving forward, upward, all conscious thought suspended in the great hivemind awareness of simple movement... Mumbai gets up and goes to it's trains.

Squeezed in like... like commuters in a Mumbai local (there really is no analogy that doesn't fall short of reality, except maybe neutron-star matter), you realize that the only difference between first and second class is that in first class, the sweat lets you identify the soap used in the morning. In second, you identify how many days ago any soap had been used.

The art of reading a newspaper in the crowd - how precisely to fold the broadsheet so that pages can be turned, quickly, efficiently, with minimal movement, minimal space occupation and minimal pokes in the eyes of fellow passengers. It's an art, it's the Local Origami that's far more challenging than it's namesake.

Time and place has no meaning in a local - all laws are suspended. So what if a few minutes a go, you had an air-conditioned office, a desk, everything. Now is when you have the Idea; and now is when you close the deal.


The ancient signboards have developed a code all of their own, one that baffles - hopelessly - the first time traveler. or even one who may have been on it for years. A code that changes with time and place, with train and direction. Green stripes or red stripes? After 7:30 or after 9? Am I carrying a large suitcase? How large is too large and has to go into th Luggage? Where is the Luggage? What is C - Churchgate, Kalyan, or Karjat? What's the difference between Neral and Nerul? Why do I see new stations every few months? What is 'return'? What is a 'starting' train, and why does it pull in pre-loaded with passengers already in the best seats? What is AD, A, K, C, T, TI, VA, V, B, and BY? How does a person balance 70 kgs on 4 fingers for 45 minutes?

Quoted from Local, by Amitava Ghosh, I think - Mumbai is the only city where you have three classes of friends - work, home, and train. People you meet only by a shared coincidence of time and destination, that grows into lifelong friendships - in the train only. Biggest example, the card clubs. 3-4 packs combined into one giant deck, a briefcase balanced carefully on 4 independent knees, and staying rock-solid despite crowds, the push and the shove, the sway and the jerk... one industrial-strength rubber band holding the loose cards down, one scorekeeper with a tiny notebook / scratchpad / ancient scroll keeping score of games that may have lasted for years, in 45-minute intervals each.

And in the late nights, when the last train leaves, and the coaches are empty, and the train is an oasis of light, silence and stability in the middle of roaring, windy, heaving darkness outside, the train is the witness to some of life's greatest aspirations - and also expressions of shattered dreams, broken hearts, dashed hopes, and the heart's last lonely cry in the end, poured out through a sketchpen onto the walls on the one thing that's remained constant through ll the upheavals. You'll find, scrawled on the walls - poetry, obscenity, cries for help, suicide notes, come-hither messages...

'I said... I will always love you, S... till the end of the world...'

Scenes and The City, Episode 1

Midnight coffee

If you're driving around late at night, especially if you're dog-tired, sleep-deprived, drunk, depressed, nicotine-starved, and/or all of the above, look out for these bikes close to the junctions in the suburbs - a late-night pick-me-up system that's so Mumbai. A cycle, with a steel canister of hot milk strapped to it, a packet of plastic cups, a bag of assorted cigarettes, and one enterprising enterpreneur.

It's quiet, apart from the occasional post-party car roaring past in high spirits; everything's the black and orange of the sodium lights, except for the blues and greens of backlit signboards standing out in stark relief from this silent, sepia world; and a small group of people, usually lone bikers, auto drivers on their last ride home for the night, and sometimes post-party teens crammed into an Alto like Fryums.

The whisk of Nescafe & sugar into the cup, milk bubbling into another, and the quick cup-to-cup pour that's a cooler, mixer, and foamer all rolled into one... then lean back against your vehicle, and have that first taste of a piping hot coffee or Boost, take a cig from this one source when all the paanwaalas are closed, light, drag, savour.

Watch out for cost cuts, though. This guy tonight flicked out a Milds from the pack with awesome elan, spun it over his fingers with a flourish, and promptly dropped it into the muck at his feet. Not missing a beat, with complete customer-centric focused businessman repeated the gesture with a fresh cig; and immediately after the dropped cig was retrieved and shoved right back into the pack in front of your horrified eyes, without as much as a wipe or dust-off.

Caveat emptor.

Let the buyer beware.