Serendipity

Claimer: All characters appearing in this work are real. Any resemblance to real persons is purely intentional. The recent heavy rains in Mumbai have prompted this reminiscence. July 2005 is and likely to remain unforgettable for most of the Mumbaites for a long long time. And so shall be the case for many like me who were visiting Mumbai, especially on the 26 th of July. I love Sales & Marketing part of my job, because it offers me an opportunity to travel, visit different places, meet various people, learn diverse cultures, enjoy multifarious foods and most of all gather lots n lots of experience. It was during one of my such visits, this one to Mumbai, where I experienced what I call until today, an epitome of customer delight! I landed in Mumbai on the 24 th evening for strategy discussions with my HQ planned on the 25 th & 26 th for two very large projects which we had targeted to acquire. We reached a decision by the afternoon of 26 th . My supervisor ...

Ego is the “I” or the self of any person; a person as thinking, feeling, and willing, and distinguishing itself from the selves of others and from the objects of its thought. Going by the above definition, certain amount of ego is essential for our basic existence. What we will be, if we do not possess any bit of it! Then why raise this point at all? It’s fine up to this extent. The problem starts beyond this. All of us, one time or the other, many times deliberately and a few times unknowingly, exert our ego. This creates issues between family members, close friends & relatives, colleagues, neighbours, etc. Nobody can remain unaffected by it. Many times we have seen the business flourishing when two brothers are working together towards a common goal and invariably one fine day we find that they have split. Barring a few cases, the reason is ego. The elder brother may think that the younger one lacks experience & maturity and on the other hand the younger one may fin...

Invariably anybody who starts learning driving a vehicle in India at any age understands sooner than later that ‘Gaadi kabhi seedhi seedhi mat chalao – warna thuk jayegi!’ Our entire eco-system on the road exists on one principle – never follow your lane and to some extent it goes even beyond this – never allow anybody to follow their lane. My early lessons of learning the art of driving happened on our humble white Maruti 800. I call it humble apropos of today’s swanky cars plying on our much improved roads. Going back in history, we had to wait for eight long months to possess it. I remember our (I & my brother) much younger cousin sister one day driving in a Tata Sumo to our place. For a moment everybody in our lane who saw the Sumo approaching felt as if the Sumo was being automatically driven (like a Google car), till the time they saw her screeching it to a halt and jumping out of it. She became our quintessential choice as a driving teacher from whom, during our vacati...

Each one of us loves to share our bit of successes with others as it makes us happy. Many times our Medals & Trophies are a proof of our success. Generally as a student, the more we have, the more successful we are perceived to be. It gives us a sense of pride to have them more in number than our closest friend or foe. There are also other forms of Medals & Trophies which may not prove us to be successful however surely convey how adventurous we would have been in our childhood and growing-up years. Quite a few of them remain with us for our lifetime, sometimes as a living proof of mischievousness. Guess what am I talking about? For me, the first Medal I received was in Class III while I studied at ‘Chukha Public School’ in ‘Cimakothi’ @ Bhutan. Being a hilly & forest country, you could find rocks emanating from ground anywhere & everywhere. There was one such rock which occupied practically 15 to 20% of our school playground. One day, while I raced with my fe...

One of the great pastimes for me is observing people. It not only helps me spend my time interestingly, it gives me an insight of how people behave and sometimes, why they behave as they behave. I go even a step further; based on my observations, I tend to classify people. The results are revealing, interesting & astonishing. I do this all the time I travel. I have been doing this all the time I have been travelling, starting from my college days. I picked-up this habit when I used to make innumerable bus journeys from Delhi to Chandigarh during 1988 to 1992, while I studied @ PEC. The crowd in a normal HRTC (Haryana Road Transport Corporation) bus used to be much different from the ‘elite’ class who used to travel by an Air Conditioned bus. It was so easy to mingle with the folks travelling by a normal bus. There used to be an atmosphere of ‘gap shap’ (chit chat). Most common language for conversation was of course Hindi / Punjabi. At any given point in time, there was ...

Recently a casual chat with a close friend led me to walk through the golden days; those days which were spent more care free than now and because of this, their memory is etched in my mind forever. Those of you who are around my age would easily relate to the times when out of many houses in the lane, only a handful of one had a TV. Luckily our house was one of those. The ‘Chitrahaar’ on Wednesday evenings and the ‘movie’ on Sunday evenings on ‘Doordarshan’ used to be a grand affair. I still recollect the max. count of 19 neighbours on a Wednesday and 23 on a Sunday, in the drawing room of our modest two-room flat in Delhi. For us, organizing such a gathering used to be a privilege as well as a treat! While we (I & my younger brother) enjoyed this privilege, we suddenly found ourselves a little wanting when one of our ‘foreign-returned’ neighbours brought with them a ‘coloured TV’. For our friends, the sleek SONY was fast becoming a popular attraction than our voluminous...

How do you define a long drive in a country like India where the distances are as vast as Kashmir (Jammu & Kashmir) to Kanyakumari (Tamil Nadu) - 3617 kms and Kutch (Gujarat) to Kumki (Arunachal Pradesh)- 3494 kms? My experience tells me that any single drive beyond 500 kms is a long drive; if not by distance, definitely by the time consumed in traversing this distance! Long Drive is one of my passions and since 1994, I’ve done many such long trips, in different states, on different road conditions, in different cars. Over the years, the road and associated infrastructure has tremendously improved however the traffic increase has kept pace with it, maintaining the criteria of defining a Long Drive intact. In the recent years, I’ve had many occasions to drive to & fro Mumbai-Ahmedabad. Today, going by the road conditions, it would be one of the best 600km Long Drives (home-to-home) you can aspire to have. With newly-built flyovers all along the way and with an exceptio...