Mass transport making mass news

To be honest, mass transport is often in news. Be it the days of the unsinkable Titanic sinking in the cold Atlantic; be it the train most of which slid in to an overflowing river during the monsoon in India after an engineer braked too hard in order to avoid hitting a cow (killing about 600, perhaps the biggest train disaster ever); or be it the planes that crashed in to the World Trade Centre and miraculously converted them to dust.

But these last few days have been quite something else. First, there were the pilots of Northwest Airlines in the US of A who overshot their destination by 150 miles only, because they were engrossed in a heated discussion about crew schedules for the next month or some such. Excuse me? Sure, you weren't sleeping, but aren't you meant to be flying instead of drawing up the schedule for your crew on your laptop while sitting in the cockpit of an airplane which has 144 passengers on board and is not on the tarmac but at 37,000 feet in the air?

Then, there was Abhishek Gupta who decided to call up GoAir at the New Delhi airport to warn them about a bomb on their Bangalore bound flight. Flight gets delayed, blah blah. Turns out, Mr Gupta was going to be late to catch that same flight, and made the casual call in a bid to buy some time. Now of course, he is doing time, as he should.

And this happened today. The not too frequent incident of a train being hijacked, albeit the second one in India this year. Done by a 'Maoist-backed group', a bunch of 300 or so stopped the train, pulled out the driver and kept him abducted for many hours, while they exchanged gunfire with the armed forces. Anyhow, no damage done, all passengers safe and the 'rebels', who had been demanding release of some of their leaders, all scattered and hid in the nearby forests.

Well, look on the bright side of things. At least you can hope that your travel will get more interesting!

Joining hordes of migrants

Moving to Bombay is a pain, even though 10,000 people do it every day, some merely in the hope of making a better living in the big city and some attracted by the glamour and the allure of the film industry. Blind to the stench that envelopes the city and oblivious to the grime that coats it, they cling to their hopes and their dreams, filling ever more its bursting trains and choked roads, making the city filthier, coarser, and more pathetic than every previous day.

I am going to join the ranks later this week, and I wish I had a choice in the matter. Don't like the city and don't like the company that is sending me there. Moreover, NDTV is asking me to join next Monday but has still not given me any sort of confirmation in writing. I would have thought that it was a scam too, but I have worked with them before and my future boss is my cousin-in-law who tells me that there should be no complications, so I am going to set myself up anyway. Small mercy that at least I already have some friends in that hell-hole of a workplace and a stench-pit passing for a metropolis. Now I need to find myself a pigeon hole in that bizarrely-priced-for-real-estate city.

But I really can't complain. After months of being bothered by a total lack of occupation, I will finally have something to do, and hopefully, it will be something I won't be averse to. I wish I knew what it is I am supposed to do, but they haven't even given me a job description yet. All the same, I am, more than anything else, relieved. Though I will miss the beautiful Delhi winter and the fog. Instead, I will see people wearing sweaters only because it makes it easier to pretend that it is cold outdoors. And I can look forward for the monsoon to turn the entire city into one huge sewer.

Two weeks later

Today is the 14th day since the last post, and hence an obvious time for an update. What has happened in the interim? Nothing much, to be honest. True, I met someone at my erstwhile and perhaps future office, and we talked for over an hour at the end of which I was left with some advice, a bagful of good wishes and the instruction to wait for a meeting with the CEO. This chat I had was on Monday and it is Friday already. No one told me but I am pretty certain the CEO won't be working weekends. And with him presently in Mumbai and me in Delhi, there is only so much hope of us meeting today.

I always considered myself rather patient but now, I am scaling new peaks among the lofty ranges of patience. One never ceases to learn.

So to pass the time, and also to keep my proverbial eggs in more than just one wicker basket, I am still applying for the few jobs that present themselves. So I went for an interview yesterday which turned out to be an English test rather than an interview. Not that I have anything against such tests, but this one was rather lame. For one, some of the questions were inherently wrong. You know, give me 10 sentences to pick out the ones with right usage of commas, and five of those sentences don't have any commas. I point this out to the woman who handed me the test paper and she looks at me like I am a retard, and says, "If there are no commas, then it is obviously wrong. Why do you need to ask?" Alright you fucking bimbo, you surely are the smart one here, not realising that it is MS-Word's auto-correct screwing up your test questions. But who am I to complain? Of course, the bimbo was nowhere to be seen for long after I was done with the "test" and after waiting uselessly for a while, I just left the papers on a table and left. Did I mention it was a hand-written test involving considerable amounts of actual writing, all without even a table to sit at? Let them figure out my handwriting.