Mumbai Meri Jaan

Nethravathi Express reached Lokmanya Tilak Terminals at 4:07 PM on Saturday Jul 6^th 2002. One of Indian Air Lines flights (from Trivandrum) also touched down at Mumbai Domestic Airport in the same afternoon. Together they ferried 14 young, energetic technocrats from CET to the dream metro of young India, Mumbai, for their first job. Yes... 14 of us- chosen ones - joined Patni Computer Systems Mumbai on 8^th Jul 2002. 2 girls and 12 guys. 5 from Com-Scies, 5 from Teli, 2 from Electricals, 1 each from Mech and M.Tech. Looking back, it was like a hand picked team, each one with some eccentricity or the other, each one capable of being the subject of a dedicated book, each coming up with the craziest of ideas. I guess I was the only one who was/is levelheaded and normal. (One advantage of writing your own blog is you get to write what you want to write :_D)

When you go out of your home state, the first concern you have in mind is about the language barrier. But we were blessed with a deluge of multi-lingual experts in our gang. One of them who claims long years at Kendriya Vidyalaya and thus proficiency in our national language was bowled out in the very first innings. Half of our group went to have a look at our future office on the Sunday, a day before our joining date. After lingering around the gate for quite some time, they were confronted by a security guard who asked them what they were up to. My friend’s reply was “Hum KAL yehaam aanewale DHE”. What he meant was “We are supposed to be here TOMORROW”. But he couldn’t get his tense right. The security rightly took ‘KAL’ with ‘DHE’ to mean ‘yesterday’ and was very concerned “What happened? You couldn’t turn up yesterday?”. My friend started sweating “Aanewaale dha dhe dhi ho hai”. It was just awesome. Chacks and me were rolling on the floor for two days on hearing abt this incident. One advantage of the entire episode is that after that none of us had to bear with our heros’ Hindi stunts. :_)

Our gangs’ language related escapades did not end there. Another friend of mine who claims to be a multilingual expert is famous for the following dialogues. He was bargaining at a TV shop, “Mumbai ke saare-ke-saara dookaandhaar muche discount detha hai... aap kyom nahi detha?” Man, this entire sentence in one breath, without any modulation, no tone or pitch change. Like a dead man speaking. The ‘dookaandhaar’ and all of us were literally rolling on the floor once this sentence was over. The same hero who wowed he would use Hindi and only Hindi from then on, went to a sweet shop. Since he did not know the names of the sweets, he told the shopkeeper, pointing at sweets, “Muche YE chaahiye... muche VO chaahiye...” The shopkeeper turned to us with the question “How old is he? Talks like a child” :_). Luckily, we survived those 2 years because we had the true blue Hindi speaker Snith with us.

After language, the next (?) most important thing is food. Most of us were affected with dysentery or some other food related stuff from the day one. I have a military trained stomach, seasoned by 6 long years of hostel life and was not much affected. Most of the others were on a staple diet of anti-dysentery tablets, which were baptised as ‘cork’. It used to act as a cork, plugging your you-know-what. I still can’t forget that pathetic face and envious look my musician roomie wore when he saw a dog doing it with so much ease on the roadside, which he couldn’t do in days. And an incomplete comment also “Even that dog...!!!”.

Patni gave us acco in a flat. 4 ppl in a 2-bed-room house. 3 houses on a floor. Thus all 12 of us ended up on the same floor of a building. I do not know what helped that building survive close to 2 months of collective madness of 12 let-loose insane souls. The things we did there were absolutely crazy. Somebody had this bright idea of amending to the nutrient intake of our daily diet with a glass of milk just before sleep. Someone else added a spoon of Complan to the milk idea. Thus three bottles (Complan, Boost and sth else), one for each house was bought. Each house had an electric heater. So post supper, all those heaters were busy boiling milk for the tired-from-the-hard-days-work technocrats. None of us knew when to stop boiling. And two of the milk vessels over boiled and overflowed. We stopped the third one in between; I doubt it was boiled completely. Anyways, we mixed whatever was left in the other two over-flown-over-boiled vessels with this under-boiled vessel’s content, and shared the resulting mixture equally, after dumping spoons full of each of the vitamin-protein-carbohydrate-rich dusts we bought. It was lucky for me that my flat-mates agreed that the idea was not that good considering all pros and cons, and we decided to stop the experiment. JithU and Sabari decided to go ahead with the routine in their flat. The routine was like...they used to buy milk every day, keep that for boiling, and then come over to our flat for general chat. Invariably the milk would over-boil and overflow. I don’t remember a single day when they could successfully drink the contents the way they wanted it. After sometime this ritual of offering milk as worship to some pagan goddesses was stopped, even though Sabari had found out that the resulting smoke and horrible smell acted as a mosquito repellant.

Ok now the next basic need of life – clothing. There used to be a mini-bus to pick us up during our training days, which left from our place at 8.15 AM. It was damn tuff for all of us to manage to get into that bus, given the fact that half of us got up on or after 8:07 AM. After a few days, somebody found out that there was an employee bus, which passed through our place at 8.45 AM. Most of us started getting up at 8.32 AM and running behind the employee bus. I still remember Chacks once entering the employee bus, with his shirt open, unbuttoned, and flying, one shoe worn, the other shoe in his left hand, socks and belt in his mouth and the training file in his right hand. It might have been an embarrassing experience for the employees (, definitely not for us) :_)

So once the basic needs are satisfied, what comes next is social life. We, the 12 CETians were seen as the hooligans of our training batch. :_) Ogling, whistling and commenting at girls... having a blast in the trainee bus, singing songs at the top of our voice.... having a jolly nice time in the training sessions. We managed to go scot-free as we were always the toppers of the batch. One CETian or the other was sure to top each test. So the staff took our monkey-tricks in the right spirit. We collected money amongst us and distributed chocolates to the entire training batch to celebrate Onam, which came during our training days. Our loud songs in the training buses were famous among most of the female population of the training batch. I guess we were unprofessional to the core, escaped mostly because we were treated as kids-straight-from-college.

We used to have ‘fierce’ arguments in the nights. About religion, atheism, communism, capitalism, gundaism and what not. You name any ism, and chances are that we must have already discussed abt that. Discussions were extended to well past mid-night, often ending with one over excited participant threatening to cease the existence of another equally excited participant from the opposite fort. When we were not debating, we were playing the all too famous card games 56 or 28. With 6 crooked individuals spending more brains and energy in finding out ways to cheat the opponent than to win the game legally. Most often teams were maintained as they were, which lead to each team having secret codes to communicate among one another. Like a single cough for a Jack, two successive coughs for a Jack and a nine of the same sign, scratch your left ankle for Spade and so on and so forth. I think it was JithU who openly abused his teammate once when they lost a game, about not following the secret code language correctly :_).

After our training days, we shifted our base camp to Lakshminarayan Complex. Thanks to Chacks’s influential uncle, we got a posh flat in a good locality. The helpful uncle was even ready to arrange for his housemaid to come over to our place and look after our stuff too. But that arrangement kind of backfired on us. Since it was not easy to throw out bottles, we had piled up bottles from our training period in our old house. It was like a dozen of beer bottles and some 3 or 4 Romenov or Smirnoff bottles. When we shifted house, Sabari had this crazy idea of taking these bottles along to keep them as a memento, and thankfully he kept that in our house. So far so good. The appointed housemaid comes to clean our house on the second day of our arrival. She enters the kitchen. Lo and behold, there is a nice collection of liquor bottles. We realized her true powers as the BBC of the complex when aunties of the complex started giving us those ‘looks’ before evening. Cant really blame her also, just the second day of a new house and what you find is over a dozen bottles. Matters turned worse when Chacks's uncle offered him a peg when he visited them the next time. :_)

Stories of our housemaid doesn’t end there, and the most embarrassing episode had me at the receiving end. Once before going home, Snith bought a ladies’ hair clip as a present for his sis. He went home and came back, safely taking the clip round the trip and forgetting to gift it. Could have ended there if he hadn’t taken it out of his bag and casually thrown it over his bed. We move to another room when our maid comes in to clean the room. After 2 min, maid comes to us with a naughty smile and the clip held high... She enacts the usual Hindi movie shy scenes and asks aloud “Ye kyaa hai”.... Nobody answers... At last me “Ye kiska hai...?” What I meant was “Whose is this? How did it reach here??”, But she took it to mean, 'out of the many girls who come here, whose is this...' She went back with a loud shy laughter. Thanks to her, I got more looks from our society women. :_(

All most every weekend we used to go to Marine Drive.... just to lie down there at the Queens neck-lace, have a couple of ice-creams from the Naturals out-let, walk all the way from Air-India building to the chowpatty. Sometimes hire a taxi to go to the hanging gardens. Walk through the colaba area, through those medieval architecture buildings... watch movies in Ragal, Sterling, Metro. Go to gate-way-of-India. Browse through the rows and rows of books, which were displayed on the footpath. Go to Bombay restaurant or Plaza Restaurant for supper. Snacks from McD. Visit Planet-M just opposite to the CST station. It used to be SO SO great....

If not Marine Drive, then it used to be Juhu, Bandra Band stand, Powai Hiranandani for bowling or carting, different places of Vashi or the R-Mall at Mulund. I guess the shopping mall Center 1 was more familiar than our own houses. The good thing about Bombay is that there is some place to go everyday of the year. The crowd is so nice and hospitable. Missing those good and not so old days, we spent at the best metro of India.