Big City Bustle

The week before last, I was travelling to see my mamaji's family for Thanksgiving. I took a bus from Boston to New York and another from New York to Allentown. I was in New York City for about half an hour on both days, going over there and coming back.

It's been a while since I've been into a big city like that. And at a bus terminal, no less. There are just so many people everywhere. People, buses, trains, lots of available options for public transport including the subway - we don't have any of that in the suburbs. It reminds me of Delhi. Delhi is a place where you will find people from all over the country, trying to achieve something or the other that they believe they can achieve by being in the city. New York is just so, except that it attracts people from all over the world.

My bus into New York, against all odds, seemed to be entering the city about half an hour early. I looked out of the window and kind of thought we were nearly there, but I didn't really believe it. (Thanksgiving is a time when everyone travels to see their families, so there's a lot of traffic. Plus, there's the big Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, because of which there are a lot of street closures. I'd read that traffic is rather crazy in or near the city because of all that. But it wasn't quite as crazy as I'd thought, though the bus terminal was quite crowded.) But then I saw a billboard. McDonald's McCafe coffee, $1.99 for a small cup. That coffee is $1 for any size out here. Then I knew I was in the city, because that's the kind of price you'd find only in a place like New York.

There's just something about a city like that which draws me to it. It's the kind of place I've lived in for the first almost twenty seven years of my life. I am big fan of the wide open spaces and the green leaves that we see around here where we live, but a city like that is just something else.

Tourist Season

Birds fly south for the winter. Bhatti flies north for the winter.

I mean, this is really not the time that someone would normally want to be touring Boston. Yesterday's high was 27 F (that's -3 C) and that's a fairly accurate representation of the weather patterns over the last few weeks. And we were out touring Boston and Cambridge in the lovely weather. We happened to go down to the banks of the Charles river and saw that even the river was frozen over. I mean, I know lakes and ponds do that, and I've been looking at them the last few days. They have a layer of ice all over them and snow accumulation on top of the ice. So you can't exactly tell that there's water underneath instead of land unless you've seen it in the summer. But I thought the river would be different because it flows. Not really, as it turns out.

Anyway, too much rambling about the weather. It was fun to see an old friend after a long while. It was fun to see bits and pieces of the city I haven't seen before. I'm hoping he will write a post on his own blog about his adventures and misadventures here in the Boston area some time in the near future.

Quacking Away!

So the city of Boston has a little tourist attraction called a Duck Tour. This is a little city tour that takes you on the roads for an hour or so, and then on a ride on the Charles river for another half an hour. They use an amphibious vehicle which was originally designed during the second World War. You can click on the link and read more on the history in case you are interested.

Now the person who conducts the tour is called a ConDUCKtor. Ours was this really jovial guy who called himself Major Scoop. He said he wanted to be a news reporter but people who hire you for those jobs care for things like college degrees, and this one was different.

He told us to greet people on the road by quacking. He also introduced the concept of a "no-quacking zone" where we quacked silently, using hand actions. It was so much fun!

The tour was about three Fs - Freedom, Firsts and Fun. He showed us sites of importance during the freedom struggle, such as the place where the tea party was planned. He told us about the stuff that first happened in Boston - the first chocolate factory, the first telephone and so on. It was nothing like anything I've ever done before. If you are anywhere around Boston at any time, you should definitely try this out.

Second Impressions Of New York City

New York city is definitely better by night than it is by day. The city comes alive with lights and people. At about midnight on a Saturday, it's about as crowded as Janpath on a Saturday evening. Maybe a little more crowded. The streets are full of people who want to sell you something or the other, or draw a sketch of you. The shopping places are all open at midnight. It's a huge change, if you are coming from a place where almost everything closes down at nine or so. Even Delhi witnesses low traffic and fewer people on the roads after ten or eleven.

Incidentally, I took my driving test on Saturday morning right before I went to New York. The police officer who examined me reprimanded me for stopping too close to a woman crossing the road on a bicycle. You are supposed to let cyclists and pedestrians pass, and you have to stop at a safe distance from them. Even if you have a green light, you have to stop for them. My examiner let me off with a warning and passed me anyway. But in New York, it's cars first. Of course, if there is somebody right in front of your car, you certainly need to stop for them, but it's not like here, where cars stop if someone is trying to cross a road and let them go first. Traffic is a lot more disorderly in New York city. I told my husband that if I drove in the city for a day, I'd go back to my Delhi ways, weaving in between the pedestrians, cycles, rickshaws and horse carts, and forget everything that my driving instructor taught me in all those lessons. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it's not entirely untrue.

I have still to see the Empire State building and the Statue of Liberty, but, well, the city for me is a great place to visit, go around, window shop on Fifth Avenue, but, at the end of the weekend, I want to be back to the peace and quiet of the green suburbs.

First Impressions Of New York City

New York City is nothing like what you've seen elsewhere. It's a concrete jungle, that's what it is. You look out of your window and you're lucky if you can see the sky and the clouds. Most people there can just see the really tall buildings in front of the really tall buildings they live in. I guess it would have been different if I'd gone straight to the city from Delhi. But once you see the suburbs and get used to the wide open spaces and tall trees and green grass, it's not a nice feeling. People tell me that it's a nice place to see in the night, and we are planning to go back and do that sometime soon, but in the daytime, it's a mess. Crazy traffic, people rushing off on the streets and occasionally bumping into each other, and, well, the roads are not as badly littered as Delhi roads, but you can see litter in places. That's something I never saw in Boston or its suburbs. Or New York's suburbs, for that matter. But the good thing about the city is that it's well-planned, the streets are all numbered so you can easily find your way, even if you are new to the city, and the subway system is planned in order to take you to any part of the city conveniently, so that you don't actually need to own a car, if you live in the city and work in the city. I happened to visit the city on a relatively hot day of the season, and it's generally warmer than Boston, being a little south of here. I realised that, in just about two months, I've lost whatever little ability I had for tolerating heat!

Oh well, I need to form a second impression of the city. I need to visit it some time in the late evening.

Weekend At The Beach

Last weekend was a long weekend for my husband (Monday was Memorial Day) and he knew I'd always wanted to go to a beach. This was a trip he'd planned a month or so before we got married.

This place, Cape Ann, is a little further north of Boston. Which means that it's a little colder out there. Daytime temperatures were in the low 70s, and nighttime temperatures in the low 50s. (Yes, I've become tuned to thinking of temperature in Fahrenheit, and distance in miles, and I am gradually tuning my brain to stop converting dollars to rupees when buying something.) That's low to mid 20s in the daytime, and between 10 and 12 in the night, if you think of the Celsius scale. So that's pretty cool weather for someone who has lived in Delhi all her life and was still there, less than a month ago. But it was quite pleasant in the daytime, when the sun was out, and since we were mostly indoors in the evenings, it was just fine.

We started our trip with an early morning whale watching cruise. There are lots of whale watch tours that begin at the harbour in the town of Gloucester. It was a slightly cold and very windy morning. I took my jacket along since I am not yet used to this weather, but Jatin did not. The lady at the ticket counter was considerate enough to point out that we should carry jackets, since it would be at least five degrees colder in the middle of the ocean. I think it was a lot colder than that! That was my first encounter with the sea. I never imagined that the first time I went near the sea, it would be the Atlantic Ocean, not the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal.

We did see a lot of whales that morning, and pretty active ones at that too. We learnt a lot about them too, from the tour guide who told us how they identify individual whales and how they follow where a whale is going when it is travelling just below the surface.

After the tour, we made our way to our little inn. It was a cosy little cottage built in colonial times, as were most of the cottages in the town. It is owned and run by an eighty three year old lady, with help from her family. We met her grand daughter, and we were told that she was herself a mother of two. It's amazing, the way a woman that old takes care of herself.

We'd planned to try out as many sorts of seafood as we could on this trip. Not that you don't get seafood here, further away from the coast, but out there, just about every restaurant serves seafood. Primarily seafood. We had salmon for lunch that day and headed out for a small beach near our inn in the evening. It was still a little chilly and windy, but way better than how it was in the middle of the ocean. Jatin went to test the water and see if he wanted to enter it, and came back with his toes freezing. We enjoyed a nice, cool, peaceful walk by the water, watching people walking their dogs, and kids running around after each other. It was so quiet, with nothing but the occasional squawk of a seagull stirring the silence.

We had dinner at a Mexican place, where the waiter was quite interested in talking to us about India and the Sikh religion. Mexican food is actually pretty good, since it is not too greasy, is nutritious, and is pretty close in taste to Indian food. Almost everything comes with beans and rice, which is just like rajma-chawal, except for minor differences in the sauce in which they cook the beans.

On our second day, we made our way to Wingaersheek beach, one of the larger and more beautiful beaches in the area. This is a more commercial place (we paid twenty five dollars for the parking!) with food stalls and beach equipment rentals. The good thing about beaches in the area is that they have a strict carry in, carry out policy. You have to take with you whatever you brought in. You have to take your trash with you. Leave behind nothing but your footprints. And people do that. It keeps the beaches clean. There were lots of people there, kids burying themselves in the sand, kids looking for seashells, girls splashing around in the water in bikinis (even in fifty degree weather, and much colder water), and people just walking about or relaxing by the seaside in their beach chairs or on their beach blankets. It actually began to rain just a few minutes after we got there, and it rained quite heavily for about fifteen minutes. We were afraid our trip was going to be ruined, but it did stop soon enough and the sun was back. We had a nice, long, lazy afternoon at the beach.

Later that evening, we went to a town called Rockport. This is a quaint little town, more like an eighteenth century English village, full of little gift shops, art galleries, ice cream parlours and ocean view restaurants. There was a place in there which had an amazing view of the sunset, in all its brightly coloured glory. It was a good place to spend an evening. We liked the place so much that we wanted to come back the next morning, to explore it properly in the daytime as well. And we did. We made a few purchases for our home from one of the art galleries, and tried to eat some lobster. After the first bite, I couldn't eat any more of it. Jatin tried to, and ended up feeling all weird afterwards. No more seafood for the trip, we decided. We had a chicken sandwich after that, and some fresh fruit.

We made our way to another place called Halibut State Park after lunchtime. This place has a beautiful quarry and a lovely view of the ocean. It's a great place to picnic with your family, or go fishing, or spend time taking pictures, or just walk about and relax by the water. We spent a couple of hours there before making our way back home.

We had a lovely trip, and we took a lot of pictures. As my mamaji pointed out, that way our parents always know what we are doing all the time. Taking pictures.

Trip To The City Of Lakes

Jatin and I took a two-day trip to Udaipur a week after our wedding. It was a much needed respite from all the adulation and attention we were getting from friends and family, an opportunity to spend quality time with just each other, getting to know each other and understanding the whole relationship that we'd just got ourselves into.

Udaipur was certainly no respite from Delhi's heat, however. But we had a beautiful room in a beautiful hotel. There was a lake, a garden overlooking the lake, and a hotel room overlooking both of them. The hotel itself resembled a palace of the kind that Maharajas in Udaipur used to live in. So it was a great place to spend the day in, and the evenings were good for going out, exploring the palaces and the lakes all around the place.

I think all the ancient cities in India have these forts built atop hills, from where you can get a view of the entire city. The monsoon palace or Sajjangarh fort was just such a fort. There is not much of the fort itself that remains for one to see, but the view from up there is spectacular.

We also visited a vintage car collection, which houses cars owned by three generations of rulers. We clicked pictures with cars in which visitors like Queen Elizabeth and Jacqueline Kennedy had ridden. Apparently all of them are pretty well maintained and are taken out for a spin in a large courtyard every couple of weeks or so.

There's also a trolley ride along a rope way from where you can see a great view of the city from a vantage point. Now forts are not safe for visiting after dark, but this is something that lets you see the whole city lit up with the evening lights.

We also visited the City Palace Museum which is a place where the life and heritage of the Maharajas has been preserved.

When we were returning to Delhi, I got to see Delhi from the sky in the night time for the first time. I'd always taken day time flights before this. Delhi looks like a beautiful collection of jewels when you look at it like that. When we were a little nearer the ground and I could make out the roads and the cars, even from up there I could see how rash people sometimes are and how haphazardly they overtake each other on the roads.

Anyway, beautiful city, good trip. Left the airport with a happy feeling, from the aftertaste of the trip, and from the knowledge that, in about twenty four hours, we'd be back to the other side of the airport, heading off towards home.

Manali Memoirs

I realize this is a little overdue, but I wanted to write this one at leisure, and I was a little short of sleep during the week immediately succeeding the Manali trip, so I had to postpone this until the weekend. Now I do not plan to tell a story here, or narrate a minute-by-minute account, just some interesting anecdotes, not necessarily in chronological order.

At the outset of the journey, it was a little doubtful if the bus driver knew the way from Noida to Delhi's Inter State Bus Terminus. Eventually, it became doubtful if he knew the way to Manali, but we'll come to that later. We were supposed to pick up Ashish and Hemant from a point near the ISBT, and I was probably the only one in the bus who knew the way to that place. And so the journey began with Alok declaring me the first lady bus conductor in the city.

We thought that Manali was about twelve hours away by bus. What we didn't know was what our driver had planned for us. He wanted to take us on a joy ride through all sorts of places, including agricultural land, which had all things nice and beautiful, except a road. He took us on a bumpy, twenty hour drive through all sorts of places previously unseen.

Now I tend to be unable to sleep through a commute of any sort. But interestingly, I was able to sleep peacefully for a whole hour through the beginning of the bumpy patch. Now this sort of thing doesn't really count as sleep for me, but some people are able to sleep a little better in buses and tend to feel that a new day has begun after they wake up. Aarti and Ruchi are two such people, who refuse to eat anything until they brush their teeth in the morning. Imagine what happens to such people when their toothbrushes are in their main bags and the boot of the bus refuses to open when they wish to use the brushes. These two did not eat anything until we arrived at our resort in the evening. As for me, I wasn't too worried about anything much. I had a good time, with all the singing going on in the bus, which was primarily being carried out by Aman at one point of time, and with Bhatti and Aman and Alok singing Bol Na Halke Halke in the most non-Halke Halke way possible.

Our travels around Manali were mainly restricted to Solang Valley. For the journey, we rented five bikes, a Pulsar and four Bullets. The Pulsar wasn't in very good shape, as Gauri discovered pretty soon. But he showed an amazing amount of patience with it, given its state and given the fact that I was riding pillion with him. Eventually I switched places with Shalu and rode with Aman, and then suddenly Aman's Bullet started acting up. That was for a very short while though, and later we had a lovely ride, in the biting cold and rain, until the time we went to the city's main market and both of us almost fell off the bike. Hemant was rather disappointed that I escaped unscathed.

Solang Valley was good, with all the snow that had fallen to the ground, and all of it that fell while we were there. We did what people generally do with snow - had a snowball fight and built a snowman.

In our resort, we had cottages with three rooms in each cottage, together with a living room and a kitchen. We did hire a cook for ourselves, but we always had the option of making something for ourselves if we wanted to. Anuranjan wanted me to make some tea. I warned him that I was making it for the second time in my life, at which Ashish insisted that he make the tea instead. Eventually we decided to make it together. Now we didn't have an appropriate utensil for it, so it was between a pressure cooker and a frying pan. I was sure that the cooker was a better choice and it would be easier to pour the tea from the cooker, but once Ashish is convinced of something, I have always found myself unable to talk him into thinking otherwise. This time I did not make futile attempts at it. I let him use the frying pan. He did eventually discover that it was rather difficult to pour the tea from the pan, and used a cup to transfer it from the pan into the kettle, after which we discovered that we were out of milk. So we served six cups of black tea with the juice of half a lemon. This tea had a lot of us awake and talking until close to six in the morning, watching Neha laugh uncontrollably, even at non-laughable matters, and Ashish roll on the floor laughing at all those things.

Speaking of laughter, there was some amount of singing around the bonfire, in the course of which, we heard a really off-key rendition of Tu Cheez Badi Hai Mast Mast from Balab and one of Zehreeley Zehreeley from Bhatti which had all of us in splits. Bhatti was actually laughing so hard himself, he could not even get to the words Zehreeley Zehreeley.

We had the first half of the next day to ourselves before we started on our homeward journey. Some of us spent some time in the market, shopping for mementos. Anuranjan asked me to get him a stole. It is still an unsolved mystery whom that stole was intended for. But he told me that he liked it, and that my taste was good. Unlike certain other people, who asked for my help in selecting a poncho and then categorically stated that I had bad taste. When I picked two of the fifteen or so that the salesman had laid out, Hemant claimed that I was confusing him and that I should pick only one. The salesman suggested that he should shortlist four or five and then pick one of those. He picked four or five that he didn't want to buy. Eventually I did pick one of the remaining ten or so which he grudgingly agreed to buy, in spite of my bad taste.

The return journey took us through much better roads, although we were considerably slowed down by dense fog. This time we got to hear some really beautiful songs from Ashish and from Prima. By this time, my throat was in pretty bad shape, but I did manage to sing a bit myself. And I managed to sleep for close to four hours, which probably exceeds the total duration of time that I have slept during all the bus rides I have ever undertaken in my life. At some point during those four hours, I realised that I was wearing only open sandals and no socks, and that my feet were freezing. Even that was not enough to wake me up.

Which brings me to another point. I do not believe too much in warm clothing. I had not worn socks since my school days, when they were part of the uniform. I have never owned a proper jacket. For this trip, I needed that kind of stuff. So there I was, with a jacket and shoes borrowed from my brother (the jacket was really warm. It felt like a quilt when I was sleeping in the bus.), a pair of socks borrowed from my dad, a cap and muffler borrowed from Bhavna (which, by the way, Anuranjan thought I'd been knitting since I was in class six and had finished only recently.), and a pair of gloves that Anuranjan bought for me.

Great trip. Special credit to Hemant, Anuranjan, Alok and Ashish for organising everything so well. To Gauri for showing an incredible amount of patience with the bike and with me, on the bike ride and also the trek to Solang Valley. And of course, to Aman, for being the protective elder brother that he has always been to me on all of our trips. If I'd actually had an elder brother, he would and should have been just like Aman. He's the only one in the team who's always been there on all the trips I've been out for, and I cannot imagine going without him.

Long Distance Friendships

I have always been closest to the friends who've been with me since school. These are the friends I've always valued the most. Until the time we finished our graduation, most of us were still in Delhi and we used to meet up often. Now almost everybody is in a different city. One is in a different continent. I'm the only one who's stuck around in Delhi all through. Everybody else has either worked or studied (or both) in at least one other city at some point of time during the eight years since we all finished school. I guess Pavitra was the first one... she went to Pune for her engineering. The rest of us all did our undergraduate studies in Delhi. Of all the friends I am still in touch with, Pavitra is the one I've known the longest. Eighteen or nineteen years, I think. This was in a day and age when cellphones were not all that popular with us. So you know, it wasn't all that easy to make long distance calls whenever one felt like it. We managed to keep in touch mainly over mail and IM. A little over three years later, Aditi went to Hyderabad to take up a job. This was a time when I'd started to feel rather weird about it all... Aditi was already a design graduate and about to take up a job. Everybody else would be a fully qualified engineer in another year's time. I was already a graduate, and had almost lost all sense of direction about what to do next with my life. Because my life was not taking me where I'd originally intended for it to. So I was all confused. Even more so owing to the fact that everybody else seemed to have a clear direction of where they were going, and seemed to be going exactly where they'd originally intended to. Adi always wanted to be a designer, as far back as I could remember. And our own Laurel (a.k.a. Sumit) and Hardy (a.k.a. Gullu, or sometimes Nikhil) had always apparently been very serious about being engineers. Ditto for Doodlee (a.k.a. Shashank) and Jayant, who were among the biggest geeks known to mankind.

Coming back from the digression, it was a short while after Sumit finished his engineering and left for Mysore that I finally got myself a cellphone and got into the habit of calling him, Adi and Pav fairly frequently. I'd actually been quite apprehensive about how well we'd be able to keep in touch at the time when Sumit was leaving Delhi. Because he'd been the friend I'd usually go to when there was something bothering me and I needed a guy's perspective on it. Quite often, he still is. My apprehensions were put to rest the day after he landed in Mysore and we had a nice chat over Yahoo which made me feel that I'd manage. I'd cope with the miles separating me from my three closest friends.

Since then, Doodlee left for Hyderabad. Jayant for Bangalore. Gullu shuttled between Mumbai and Pune and Delhi. Pav moved to Chennai, and back to Pune. Adi came back to Delhi and then went to Jaipur and is now in Delhi again. Sumit went to Bangalore and then to Perth and then again to Bangalore and then to Melbourne. And I'm still here. Never worked outside the National Capital Region.

I had two amazing trips visiting my friends in different cities. In April 2006 I visited Doodlee in Hyderabad, where Sumit also joined us. I had the loveliest time over there. This was just after I finished my internship, so I had a little money from the stipend I got during the internship. And it was just before I took up my first job, so I had a little time on my hands. It was a good feeling, financing my own flight tickets and going that far from home all by myself for the first time. Doodlee was a wonderful host and showed us around really nicely. I saw a whole bunch of places, ranging from the Microsoft campus to Ramoji Film City, which hosts a bunch of sets used in various Bollywood movies. We had an amazing weekend, with the three of us staying up till 5 AM and chatting and still managing to get up at 7 AM and spend the entire day sightseeing without falling asleep at the Charminar :D.

And then there was New Year's 2007 which I celebrated in Jaipur when Adi was there. I'd spent all my life in Delhi and had never once visited Jaipur before that. I'd never seen the Hawa Mahal, or the Johari Bazaar (it's a very different experience, shopping for jewellery with a jewellery designer by your side :-) ), or the Nahargarh and Amer forts. I'd never before (or afterwards, for that matter) watched a Hollywood movie dubbed in Hindi. We spent some part of New Year's Eve watching Night At The Museum in Hindi. We had a ridiculously good time watching Ben Stiller hum a Himesh Reshammiya number. On that trip I injured both my feet in multiple places, including a pretty serious injury on one of my toes which was quite horrific. Since then history has repeated itself multiple times and I have developed a strong tendency to injure/sprain/fracture my feet. Thankfully they all healed pretty quickly and I was left with the happy memories.

There's a Pune trip and a Bangalore trip still on my to do list. Possibly one of them will materialize during this year's shutdown. Sumit wanted me to add Melbourne to this list. But I guess I'm waiting for him to return to India and visit him in whichever city he sets up camp :P

It's actually been really, really long since I saw all these friends together in one place. Keeping in touch has been a little intermittent at times, very regular at others, but we have managed to keep each other updated on the important stuff. We have managed to be there for each other in our hour of need. We have managed to feel close, in spite of being far apart.

In The Lap of The Ganges

I know this is a little overdue, but I have to write about my most memorable trip ever. Possibly among the happiest three days I ever experienced. It was not my first white water experience, nor was it my first trip with my teammates. I'd actually been rafting over a subset of the same stretch of rapids with my team the previous year. Although, as a matter of fact, there were only four people other than myself who were part of both the trips.

So most of the people going rafting that weekend were from my team, except for a couple of Ashish's (Random observation: I think this is the first time I'm actually referring to one of my friends by name in my blog. So far I've only referred to people by description) childhood friends, and my friend Aarti, whom Ashish and Hemant also knew and asked me to invite along. Come along with us she did, as did another friend of hers.

The day we were supposed to leave for our camp from Noida started out with an almost torrential and completely unseasonal downpour. And that gave us some amazing weather. Aarti, her friend Deepa and I spent a large portion of that evening enjoying the lovely breeze out in the open, walking around and, well, since I'd seen Aarti after quite some time, so we were catching up with the latest in each other's lives. Oh, and that was the evening Ashish tried to ram his car into the three of us :P

So anyway, after a bit of delay, as is usual for a trip involving around twenty five people, we set out for Devprayag (I think that was the name of the place from where we started our rafting) amidst good weather and good cheer. After all, we were taking an extended weekend off from our drab routines to wash away our sins in the Ganges and have a lot of fun doing it! On the bus ride, there was a lot of singing, chattering, leg pulling. (Especially with Aman teasing Anuranjan and me endlessly. But I'm not really complaining here. Because I know I provoked all that!) There were only two or three people in the group whom I did not know prior to this trip, but there were, apparently, quite a few I was not well acquainted with. Who'd known me only from a distance or on a strictly professional, developer-quality engineer interaction level. So a bunch of people got to see the real me during that bus ride. Another thing about that bus ride. I normally cannot sleep while travelling. On our Dalhousie trip, we were travelling all night and everyone was asleep but I was awake for the most part of the night. Only after Rachita gave me a nice, relaxing forehead massage was I able to sleep for just under half an hour. But on this journey I had a little over a couple of hours of deep sleep. Apparently Ashish's singing was a lot more soothing than Rachita's massage.

So, anyway, after some digression from our route and a stopover for breakfast, we finally made it to our starting point for the day's rafting. On the banks, some of us helped pump up the air into the rafts. After they did a bit of pumping with all their might, we were told that those rafts were not ours and ours were already ready down at the riverbank. By the way, the unseasonal showers continued all the way and at the time of which I speak, it was drizzling. When we started our journey down the river, it was raining considerably and the shower continued all through the way that day. The first day's rapids were relatively mild, and not too exciting for those of us who had experienced rapids before, so the rain added the component of novelty that we needed there. Even so, we were quite thankful when the skies cleared up that evening and the next day came up all bright and sunshiny.

The evening was completely awesome. There is something that I did not find out about Anuranjan on any of the earlier trips. After he's had a couple of drinks, his sense of humour becomes absolutely legendary! He'll poke fun at anyone and everyone in that state, and everyone will have a good time. And the frequency with which he uses his favourite word - bhangi - will go up exponentially. There was a lot of interesting conversation centered around the origin and the meanings of this word, and what it takes to be a bhangi or to marry a bhangi. Then one of the guys at the camp did a little song in the local dialect for us, which set off a bit of discussion on love and heartbreak.

There was talk of going for a night trek after the campfire and dinner, but that was dropped in favour of going down to the beach (the riverside beach, that is) and counting shooting stars. Aman, Anuranjan and Gauri built a futuristic sand house for themselves, complete with a helipad and bean bags. And then there was the part where Aman made a mental map of our floor back in the office, iterated over every cubicle and cabin, and asked me for my opinion on every guy I knew. He claimed he was trying to judge my taste in guys so he could help me find one for myself. Meanwhile Mr Gaurishankar Kshirsagar was spotting shooting stars and counting away to glory. He wished a dozen wishes that evening and I doubt if any of them have come true so far. Alok tried really hard to match up to the number of stars that Gauri had spotted, but not to much avail. Oh, and those who were there on the beach that night will always remember that once Alok starts laughing, there's no stopping him!

On our second day there, there was a little trek to a waterfall, actually a series of three waterfalls. We had to climb up the lowest and smallest one of the three to go and shower under the second one. I don't think there were too many people in the group who could have done that without Aman and Sunny pulling us up, and Dahuja pushing from below. Now that was a lot of fun, an experience to remember.

That evening we did some miscellaneous activities in the camp. There was a bit of beach volleyball, a bit of rappelling (I think everyone remembers Meenal's experience there!!!) and throwing stones at an empty soft drink bottle (a plastic one). And we buried Ashish and Alok in the sand, turn by turn. Later in the evening it was back to the campfire, and Anuranjan and his alcohol. That night we decided to go down to the beach with our blankets and sleeping bags, and sleep on the sand. There were six of us who finally executed this plan, and I'm glad I was one of them. On the beach, we were back to wishing upon stars (Gauri saw another dozen that night), revealing secrets, and laughing at each other. And I think we all slept really peacefully that night.

The next day's rafting involved some interesting rapids, albeit a couple of overrated ones too (perhaps it was just that we passed over them when the water was a little low), but the ones we traversed after our lunch stopover were a lot of fun. And then there was the cliff jumping which I did not do, and which Aman did around half a dozen times, over and over again, until the guides started pointing out that we had to finish our stretch on the river before dark.

Even so, our departure for Noida was delayed by two or three hours. But well, every moment of this trip was worth it. But hang on, I have some memories from the return journey too. I'm sure neither Ashish nor I will ever forget the time when he asked me who, out of himself and Hemant, was a better singer. I will certainly not forget how jealous Ashish pretended to be at my answer! And I have been taunted about that little incident any number of times since then. But, all said and done, Ashish actually does sing really well. His singing is even better than Anuranjan's sense of humour (comparing apples and oranges, are we? But I guess people will get the drift.).

Those three days were legendary. But I'd been away from home for three days and I really wanted to go home and take a nice, warm bath, eat something my mom had cooked and sleep in my own bed. I called my mom when we stopped for tea that evening. Actually, Alok made me call her. I told her we'd reach Noida around one in the morning. She put her foot down at the idea of me driving home all by myself at that hour. I knew she was right, Delhi is not a very safe city. But I still wanted to go home. And quite possibly, I would have, if Ashish hadn't told me not to do so. In a slightly scolding manner. So I stayed over at Meenal's place that night. When we reached her place, we did not have the energy to do anything more than fall into bed and go to sleep immediately.

Does that conclude all I want to say about this trip? By no means. I could go on forever. Well, for a really long time at least. But while writing I try to stay concise and I have already gone way past my regular standards of being concise, so I'll just conclude here. Ashish, Alok and Hemant did a fantastic job organizing this trip. And Aman and Anuranjan did an equally fantastic job adding flavour to it.