An Interesting Day

aka Why I should never fall short of blogging material...



The day began well. Very well, infact. For one, the heat didn’t kill me. I had a song in my heart, and the same was emitted from my lips as completely indistinguishable cacaphony. ‘A Beautiful Day, ey ey, don’t let it get away’, my heart prompted but my karoke skills are only a shade better than Godzilla’s, and the sound that emnated went something like this : “Garble Bargeley, ey ey, garble some more dey”. No matter. It was indeed a ‘garble bargeley’ and my spirit was as light as a feather, a far cry from my actual self.

Now for those of you that don’t know, my means of transport to work and back are the ubiquitous public auto things fondly called Vikram (don’t ask me why). Autos on steroids is what I like to call them. They are also known as tempos, but they set no such thing, travelling at a snail’s pace, despite which they are more dangerous to pedestrians than a drunk Salman Khan in pursuit of a black buck. Usually they are driven by daredevils (read maniacs) in the eternal pursuit of the Guiness record for maximum number of bodies, preferably human, that they can pack into these dastardly machines. Bodies reaching their destination alive is fairly low on the list of priorities. Being that as it may, it still finds immense popularity as a mode of transport, as the only less lethal option is possibly a flying carpet, which in these recession ridden times are extremely hard to come by. Office timings are particularly bad as the drivers’ zeal for setting, breaking, and re-setting the record is the highest at this time. I usually end up hanging on to the sides, for dear life...

This day was going to be different. There was actually a seat for me! Ok, it was this stool that the driver had so graciously tied to the back of the vehicle, large enough to accommodate about half of a single Kate Moss butt cheek(the standard unit of butt cheek measurement), which roughly translates into about one-tenth of mine. As Bono kept telepathically telling me all morning, I wasn’t going to ‘let it get away’. I chased the auto down, got him to stop, hoisted my self onto the stool, taking the support of the cushioned seat in front to get my above average frame up. Only, the cushioned seat was actually the well padded shoulder of a lady with a much larger frame than me….

Dirty looks ensued and in my shock I let go of what little support I had (however unsupporting she was to my cause) but a few acrobatic moves and a near death experience later I had managed to plonk myself on the stool. The rest of the journey to work was uneventful, thankfully. I was scheduled to participate in some software orientation that day, which made me feel slightly more useful than before because upto that point my job description could at best be described as ‘professional web surfer’. So in I marched into the conference room with a single minded and dedicated purpose to master the software and prove to be a useful asset to my company. In one smooth motion I switched my screen on, swivelled myself into place and punched out my password. Staying true to form, my computer did what any self respecting machine working on any mechanism more complicated than a simple pulley would do when the user is feeling extremely productive. It crashed, gloriously, like it had been given a 'stunner' by Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Me and machines have never got on very well(Yes, I know… I am a mechanical engineer. It’s ironic. Don’t laugh). I think it all started back when I’d got a new CD player, from ‘Aunty in US’ (all of us Indians have at least one of those no?) , rendering my up to then faithful Philips Walkman redundant. A few CD buying sessions later (ok, who am I kidding, shameless downloading and burning sessions later) I figured I could try figuring out how my walkman actually worked. I ended up massacaring the poor thing. It wasn’t a pretty sight. I tried soldering the wires I cut with candle wax. I guess Electronics never forgave me.

The limit of my computer maintenance skills are switching on and off the system, which I religiously did, ten times, but to no avail. My computer screen was showing absolutely no change. In the background I heard one of the co-particpants remember his sister with some fervour. ‘Oh bahen, oh bahen’, he kept saying. ‘Must have missed her birthday’, I thought, ‘ Poor chap, she’ll give him such a tongue lashing now. No wonder he is so riled up’. It took me a while to realize that the reason for his sudden outburst was that the system I was fiddling around with was actually his.In fact I even remember the precise moment it dawned upon me. It was when he exclaimed ‘Oye bahen di fuddi, yeah kya ho gaya! Woah teri! Apne aap switch on-off ho raha hai bhai yeh….’. Silently I moved my fingers away from his sytem and spent another fifteen minutes surreptitously looking around for mine.

If that wasn’t enough to derail me, the incident in the evening was the final nail in the coffin! As many of you may know, I have been a loyal foot soldier in the Battle of the Bulge for aeons now. Loyal doesn’t imply I have never deserted the cause but I have always returned to the legions (on gaining 5kg or finding that my pants get stuck half way up my thighs, whichever comes first) in our aim to make the world a lighter place. Luckily for me, there’s a gym in the basement. After a rigorous workout, comprising of stretching , shaking hands with the trainer and making false promises to, and I quote ‘actually move my fat ass’ (in Hindi of course, which went like this : 'apni moti gaand tho hilao') the following day, I decided to weigh myself. Imagine my consternation when I got on the thing and it read ‘ERROR’ ! I know it’s wrong to be so unhealthy but who did this digital weighing scale think it was to give me health tips ?? I proceeded to get on and off it, so much so that some of the other new members at the gym thought it was a new piece of exercise equipment. The machine kept giving the same message though, until after about 50 reps it became ‘ERR’. So now it was mocking me! I persevered, and after what must have been my best wrk out in yeras the ‘ERR’ too began fading into nothingness until the screen went completely blank. Yes! Deepak 1, Evil Weighing Machine 0. And that, my friends is the end of my wonderful day. The fat lady (yes, that very same one I physically molested that morning) has sung.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that the following morning the song on my lips was ‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow’, with the ‘yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone’ sung with particular joy, happiness and relief. Of course, to you it would have still sounded like , ‘Garble bargling garblow’……..