It has been a very very long time since I updated my Blog with something written.... my previous post and the current post being two halves of the same literary effort - a direct result of the suppressed writer in me bursting at the seams, so here goes...
The Madgaon station was a modern station and was very elegantly designed - not like your usual early 1900's, about-to-collapse-at-any-time kind of station but large and imposing and most importantly, clean! We halted for nearly half an hour there but yours truly was disappointed to find that they sold absolutely no newspaper worth reading (for someone who has been brought up reading the Hindu, the TOI doesn't even remotely come into that category - I can write more about this but the transgression would be unwarranted).
Soon we were off again, chugging into the western ghats with only the grey of the clouds above and the green of the valleys and plains below to give the train company. Outside, not a soul could be seen for miles and miles. Not that we were looking out all the time though. We spent almost the whole of the morning, afternoon and evening playing cards, cards and more cards.
Ah the Game of Cards! There is an interesting topic if ever there was one... what is so fundamentally attractive about manipulating your fortunes against the laws of probability is something I am unable to figure out. Of course, not being good at playing any of these card games makes me unfit to comment on the charms of finding that one have a full hand or can go trumps or whatever. So I will leave that to the judgement of people more suited to the kind of mental make up that card games require.
I remember playing a game called 'Donkey' which required me to keep track of how many cards in each suit have been played. Shashu, our resident playing card expert and Suhas, another of our experts, could keep track of it with the most amazing ease... But I dont know why it was so difficult for me to have an abacus kind of setup in my mind that would increment the cards played of each suit as and when dealt with. Hmm...something worth pondering about. I need to have a more 'shoe-box' kind of mind that can compartmentalise information simultaneously and process them in parallel.
Bottom line is that I was absolutely hopeless at it and it was the most remarkable piece of luck that I was able to manage to avoid becoming Donkey all the time. To add to my already extant confusion, I was constantly distracted by the mind-numbing scenery that was whistling past my window pane - green here, green there, green everywhere; the only places on the ground that were not green were a muddy-red-brown -- pools or streams of water caused by the incessantly glorious rains that accompanied us throughout the journey.
Of course, the ghat section was another treat to the eyes. It was either raining or had just recently rained throughout the section. We were faced with majestically rising rock faces on one side coloured a deep, glistening grey and an undulating slope dying away into a river or a stream on the other... stunning to say the least. Of course there was the added attraction of seeing the train screech into a tunnel every few minutes.
There is something fascinating about trains entering and exiting tunnels which I am unable to put into words. I remember reading many Enid Blyton books in my childhood where she describes trains whistling and screeching their way through tunnels and, predictably enough, describing situations where kids get into and the most amazing tight spots imaginable! At the end of it all, I was thrilled every time we entered a tunnel and even more thrilled to look back and see the last bogies of the train trail us as we exited. I had taken a couple of pictures of the train coming out of the tunnel (posted them sometime back) and the pics looked ethereal to say the least!
Well, time progressed and we kept playing, eating and admiring the scenery over and over again. soon it was becoming dark and we finally broke off cards for the day, had dinner and settled down for a lazy night. Again, yours truly started nodding off by around 10 PM, much to the amusement of Kela and Shashu, who were actually talking to me about my phenomenal capacity to sleep off at a particular time irrespective of what was happening around me. There have been incidents of that sort in my first year here so far. But second year seems to have taken its toll on me. I find that I am able to stay awake easily till 12 -12.30 AM nowadays. After that it is a bit of a fight though :)
Again a strange thing regarding my sleep patterns is that I find it much easier to stay awake when I am amongst friends, chatting away on arbit things in life. I also find it easier to stay awake when there is a team deadline near at hand and I have to work under severe time pressure. There is an adrenaline rush to be had from trying to structure your thoughts quickly to meet the deadline! Nothing like having your favourite music playing in the background at that point of time either!
The next day dawned bright and fine and we were nearing dear old Amdavad...we still had two plus hours of waking time to be spent inside the train and I will give you four options as to what we might have done
a) play cards
b) play cards
c) play cards
d) play cards
:D
Finally, we landed up at the station and after an uneventful but bone jarring journey in a mass of metal that the owner has the gall to call an 'autorickshaw' we made it in one piece to the campus and life in the fifth term was about to start in full swing for us...
I wrote something about wanting to avoid commenting more on the TOI for it being an unwarranted transgression....but as it panned out, the entire blog entry has been a series of such deviations. Can't help it though. I simply had to let myself go today....
Blogging off,
Ranga
The Madgaon station was a modern station and was very elegantly designed - not like your usual early 1900's, about-to-collapse-at-any-time kind of station but large and imposing and most importantly, clean! We halted for nearly half an hour there but yours truly was disappointed to find that they sold absolutely no newspaper worth reading (for someone who has been brought up reading the Hindu, the TOI doesn't even remotely come into that category - I can write more about this but the transgression would be unwarranted).
Soon we were off again, chugging into the western ghats with only the grey of the clouds above and the green of the valleys and plains below to give the train company. Outside, not a soul could be seen for miles and miles. Not that we were looking out all the time though. We spent almost the whole of the morning, afternoon and evening playing cards, cards and more cards.
Ah the Game of Cards! There is an interesting topic if ever there was one... what is so fundamentally attractive about manipulating your fortunes against the laws of probability is something I am unable to figure out. Of course, not being good at playing any of these card games makes me unfit to comment on the charms of finding that one have a full hand or can go trumps or whatever. So I will leave that to the judgement of people more suited to the kind of mental make up that card games require.
I remember playing a game called 'Donkey' which required me to keep track of how many cards in each suit have been played. Shashu, our resident playing card expert and Suhas, another of our experts, could keep track of it with the most amazing ease... But I dont know why it was so difficult for me to have an abacus kind of setup in my mind that would increment the cards played of each suit as and when dealt with. Hmm...something worth pondering about. I need to have a more 'shoe-box' kind of mind that can compartmentalise information simultaneously and process them in parallel.
Bottom line is that I was absolutely hopeless at it and it was the most remarkable piece of luck that I was able to manage to avoid becoming Donkey all the time. To add to my already extant confusion, I was constantly distracted by the mind-numbing scenery that was whistling past my window pane - green here, green there, green everywhere; the only places on the ground that were not green were a muddy-red-brown -- pools or streams of water caused by the incessantly glorious rains that accompanied us throughout the journey.
Of course, the ghat section was another treat to the eyes. It was either raining or had just recently rained throughout the section. We were faced with majestically rising rock faces on one side coloured a deep, glistening grey and an undulating slope dying away into a river or a stream on the other... stunning to say the least. Of course there was the added attraction of seeing the train screech into a tunnel every few minutes.
There is something fascinating about trains entering and exiting tunnels which I am unable to put into words. I remember reading many Enid Blyton books in my childhood where she describes trains whistling and screeching their way through tunnels and, predictably enough, describing situations where kids get into and the most amazing tight spots imaginable! At the end of it all, I was thrilled every time we entered a tunnel and even more thrilled to look back and see the last bogies of the train trail us as we exited. I had taken a couple of pictures of the train coming out of the tunnel (posted them sometime back) and the pics looked ethereal to say the least!
Well, time progressed and we kept playing, eating and admiring the scenery over and over again. soon it was becoming dark and we finally broke off cards for the day, had dinner and settled down for a lazy night. Again, yours truly started nodding off by around 10 PM, much to the amusement of Kela and Shashu, who were actually talking to me about my phenomenal capacity to sleep off at a particular time irrespective of what was happening around me. There have been incidents of that sort in my first year here so far. But second year seems to have taken its toll on me. I find that I am able to stay awake easily till 12 -12.30 AM nowadays. After that it is a bit of a fight though :)
Again a strange thing regarding my sleep patterns is that I find it much easier to stay awake when I am amongst friends, chatting away on arbit things in life. I also find it easier to stay awake when there is a team deadline near at hand and I have to work under severe time pressure. There is an adrenaline rush to be had from trying to structure your thoughts quickly to meet the deadline! Nothing like having your favourite music playing in the background at that point of time either!
The next day dawned bright and fine and we were nearing dear old Amdavad...we still had two plus hours of waking time to be spent inside the train and I will give you four options as to what we might have done
a) play cards
b) play cards
c) play cards
d) play cards
:D
Finally, we landed up at the station and after an uneventful but bone jarring journey in a mass of metal that the owner has the gall to call an 'autorickshaw' we made it in one piece to the campus and life in the fifth term was about to start in full swing for us...
I wrote something about wanting to avoid commenting more on the TOI for it being an unwarranted transgression....but as it panned out, the entire blog entry has been a series of such deviations. Can't help it though. I simply had to let myself go today....
Blogging off,
Ranga
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