i've found my way back to my blog... thanks to google that syncs your life better than you ever can... the last blog i wrote was 19 months ago... so here goes..
once upon a time in npa, we had some teaching faculty who insisted that we list out three of our biggest fears and give it confidentially to her... i'm sure she'd picked it up from some management guru guy.. surprisingly, or maybe not so, a lot of us couldn't fill up the tiny list... to make things up, i think i wrote about cockroaches and lizards... now, that's a lie, if you've ever had the fortune/misfortune of crossing my path... i once braved a water snake in a well/pit, waded in knee deep water, to get some brown murky water, which was later used to make maggi and chai... now, don't you dare go eewww!
anyway, for a while i thought my secret fear was to live alone... i've been in hostels and residential schools and PGs (paying guests) and other similar places for too long to be considered healthy... and the first couple of months in agartala freaked the bejesus out of me! i realized it when my only batchmate moved to the neighbouring district and i missed him terribly, though i hadn't exchanged more than twenty words with him in my year at the academy... but now, like all new things, i've gotten used to it... we all have coping mechanisms...
i have realised that your driver is a very good psychiatrist... why? he's too busy driving to pay any attention to any details you might inadvertently blurt out... when i rant in my chequered bangla/hindi/english, the poor guy has no clue what the context is, or who's the latest moron to have me all worked up... like recently, it was a senior who had me convinced that in the govt, if you put in enough years of service, a dunce could get the top post if he hangs on long enough... anyway, coming back to the indispensibility of drivers, they remember where you ought to be going... since all roads look straight and black to me, i can never remember where i'm coming from or where i ought to be going... though things get horribly mixed up sometimes... i today told him i wanted to go to the 'flex printing' place... i needed a huge map done.. he hears me selectively...so, he decided that i wanted to check on 'posts' and showed me around town for an hour before i realized that the town is not big enough to take me an hour to go to any place... i rechecked with him!
"where's the flex place?"
"madam, aaj saturday hai, to traffic kam hai... aur dukan bhi band hai..." he replied in some strange context i didn't fathom..
"to mera flex printing shop bhi band hai??"
"oh, accha aapko wahan jana hai, madam... mujhe laga apko traffic post dekhna hai!" he exclaimed
then, after that eureka moment, he drove for half an hour and brought me to a car/bike jazzing up/altering showroom and parked confidently in a No Parking zone... he almost meant 'voila!!'
"yeh kya hai???" i wondered aloud... coz i didn't think the govt would sponsor any graphic prints of flames and fires for my pristing white govt gypsy...
"aapna toh bataya!" he seemed frustrated that i kept changing my mind from "posts" to "flags" to "flex" to
i had no idea what he thought i'd said, but at this point, i figured we'd reached one of our impasse... where each is no condition to understand the other...his mother tongue is 'Kokborok', a tribal tongue, and mine, kannada... we reach across borders and have compromised... i speak hindi... he sticks to bangla... so, at the best of times, we get 30% of what the other is saying...
anyway, it's all in a day's life, like in RD... so, i forgot the whole issue, got some vehicles towed, some challaned and just came back... after all, you cannot have everything in life!!!
once upon a time in npa, we had some teaching faculty who insisted that we list out three of our biggest fears and give it confidentially to her... i'm sure she'd picked it up from some management guru guy.. surprisingly, or maybe not so, a lot of us couldn't fill up the tiny list... to make things up, i think i wrote about cockroaches and lizards... now, that's a lie, if you've ever had the fortune/misfortune of crossing my path... i once braved a water snake in a well/pit, waded in knee deep water, to get some brown murky water, which was later used to make maggi and chai... now, don't you dare go eewww!
anyway, for a while i thought my secret fear was to live alone... i've been in hostels and residential schools and PGs (paying guests) and other similar places for too long to be considered healthy... and the first couple of months in agartala freaked the bejesus out of me! i realized it when my only batchmate moved to the neighbouring district and i missed him terribly, though i hadn't exchanged more than twenty words with him in my year at the academy... but now, like all new things, i've gotten used to it... we all have coping mechanisms...
i have realised that your driver is a very good psychiatrist... why? he's too busy driving to pay any attention to any details you might inadvertently blurt out... when i rant in my chequered bangla/hindi/english, the poor guy has no clue what the context is, or who's the latest moron to have me all worked up... like recently, it was a senior who had me convinced that in the govt, if you put in enough years of service, a dunce could get the top post if he hangs on long enough... anyway, coming back to the indispensibility of drivers, they remember where you ought to be going... since all roads look straight and black to me, i can never remember where i'm coming from or where i ought to be going... though things get horribly mixed up sometimes... i today told him i wanted to go to the 'flex printing' place... i needed a huge map done.. he hears me selectively...so, he decided that i wanted to check on 'posts' and showed me around town for an hour before i realized that the town is not big enough to take me an hour to go to any place... i rechecked with him!
"where's the flex place?"
"madam, aaj saturday hai, to traffic kam hai... aur dukan bhi band hai..." he replied in some strange context i didn't fathom..
"to mera flex printing shop bhi band hai??"
"oh, accha aapko wahan jana hai, madam... mujhe laga apko traffic post dekhna hai!" he exclaimed
then, after that eureka moment, he drove for half an hour and brought me to a car/bike jazzing up/altering showroom and parked confidently in a No Parking zone... he almost meant 'voila!!'
"yeh kya hai???" i wondered aloud... coz i didn't think the govt would sponsor any graphic prints of flames and fires for my pristing white govt gypsy...
"aapna toh bataya!" he seemed frustrated that i kept changing my mind from "posts" to "flags" to "flex" to
i had no idea what he thought i'd said, but at this point, i figured we'd reached one of our impasse... where each is no condition to understand the other...his mother tongue is 'Kokborok', a tribal tongue, and mine, kannada... we reach across borders and have compromised... i speak hindi... he sticks to bangla... so, at the best of times, we get 30% of what the other is saying...
anyway, it's all in a day's life, like in RD... so, i forgot the whole issue, got some vehicles towed, some challaned and just came back... after all, you cannot have everything in life!!!
