Hyderabad Express

Hyderabad Express

I had decided that I would go along with Lakshmi PL to Chennai the next time. The reasons are fairly simple, if I have to travel alone, I take the next flight out of the city and the entire trip costs a lot of money in comparison to train travel. Besides with Lakshmi there is company. Only I didn’t realize that I was still psychologically sick of train journeys. It generally happens on the trains when people open up their food packets or the train begins to stink. It is a sad state of affairs. I took tablets for digestive disorders and its immediate aftereffect-systems. After frantically rushing to catch the train, we got into a compartment filled with “bugs”. There were bugs everywhere, coming in from all corners of the train. Argh! Then there were the people around, who were like the most nosy people. This huge lady and five others who were traveling with her. Amazingly gobbling up food and water like there is no tomorrow. After showing the tickets to the ttr and making ourselves comfortably seated away from the bugs, though it was a pathetic attempt at that. No matter how much you avoid it, you just cant escape it. Especially when you are tired and don’t have the energy to react. There have to be babies to just complete Murphy’s law! One starts and it is like a chain reaction. There is no escaping that particular fate. Just has to happen. We try to sleep, get on our respective berths and try to sleep when the train just has to come to a halt and slumber just vanishes. It takes about two hours for it to come back, by which time the train is approaching the next station. The weird part of traveling by trains is that you can’t read a book after the lights are out by popular demand. The concept of photography at dawn is also not allowed in these means of transport.

Talking about instances where you have to share confined spaces with unknown strangers, it should not take too much common sense to figure out basic manners, and that you should not be a pain in the arse for the people around you. As while using the public loo – it should occur to you that you should leave it clean, if not for anything just for the chance that you may have to use it again. Most of the times it so happens that I have to spend my valuable time with some dumb ass un-couth rogue from the most metropolitan cities of this country! To put it in other words, it is just not enough that you say you use toilet paper, but it is most important that you know how to use it. Most of these uncivilized pseudo westerners hardly know that there are seven forks in a full course meal, but claim that they always have eaten by fork and spoon! Argh!!!!! Lets just say when the colonial rule ended, they left behind some of the half-bred vultures without culture. In case you want to see the specimens in live, just look in the cab/train/bus that you travel in or maybe even your roommate. No I am not talking about Lakshmi! Sometime more often than frequently you may have to witness or hear things that simply are out of the world. Some personal experiences.
· In a cab from work to airport, traveling with a three others - one from the same team as me and the others from a different team. This girl from the other team is Indian by birth but spent her good years abroad. The guy from the team is a fake.. May be from some interior village in Bihar – it is quite a shame that he comes from a place that Mr. L.P. Yadav belongs to. The conversation begins and we painfully have to listen to it. Our dude claims to the girl that he can actually write a search algorithm, and would love to work on the Google search algorithm. He happily assumed that we(my colleague and I) were from the HR dept. Now we had to interrupt and ask him how he planned to go about writing the algorithm.. And once our dude got to know we were from SQE he went on to say.. “Umm… well.. Been really long since I studied the paper.. Besides I am not confident and all that.. but I would love to see you guys work”
· Another day in the cab... two people talking about threshold energy and activation energy. When you are from a science background and get into a job that has no relation with science other than maybe the occasional biology influence, it obviously speaks a lot about your interests in life. Therefore when you claim you are fresher with a science background, and end up boasting about concepts of science, please be careful about the things that you may end up saying - people may end up having their theories and hypothesis disapproved by the scientists. By the way, for the sake of it, threshold energy is the minimum kinetic energy a pair of traveling particles must have when they collide. The threshold energy is always greater than or equal to the rest energy of the desired particle. In most cases, since momentum is also conserved, the threshold energy is significantly greater than the rest energy of the desired particle - and thus there will still be considerable K.E. in the final particles and Activation energy is defined as the energy that must be overcome in order for a chemical reaction to occur. Activation energy may otherwise be denoted as the minimum energy necessary for a specific chemical reaction to occur
· Any time you travel with married/committed people you will get to hear “miss you “’s and all that mush but then sometimes it gets worse... Makes you want to stop the cab, get off, and say “yuck”. I then understood the need to invent some of the new gadgets like Ipods and cell phones with music/radio players.
· Cleanliness is quite a problem. Do not go by external appearances. They may be the most well dressed people in the world, but trust me they do not wash their clothes for more than three months. I again understood the need to buy deodorants. Thank god!

Sometimes I wonder where they get so many with the same kind of “personality” may be a 100% foolproof hiring strategy! Should seriously consider a 6sigma on the process. Will get to learn a lot.

Let me not digress anymore from the topic, am sure if you have spoken to me about my dislikes on a certain breed of Homo sapiens, you would have understood. Anyone who has an opinion (good or bad, I don’t care) do leave a comment.

After some vain attempts at sleeping, we reach Chennai central at last. After an awesome four days in the humid weather of Chennai, it was time to get back to dry Hyderabad. We get into the train. And the train is again filled with a weird crowd. Would not like the racist streak come out in the open by writing about the crowd. But I slept so very well. And I wake up after five to find myself in the middle of nowhere. And nowhere is called Nagiredipalli. The train stood there for more than three and a half hours. Eventually moving like the Hyderabad traffic to get us here four hours after scheduled arrival time. The crowd from this train had jumped onto a train, which had taken a brief halt. most of that trip was peaceful. While we were waiting in the middle of Nagiredipalli, Lakshmi wanted to get on to the next train that stood there and go to Hyderabad. Restless and hyperactive from lack of sleep, the woman had a plethora of ideas of how to get to work without being late. Finally, after much coaxing, actually stubbornness, we stayed put in the train. We had to get to work. Coming home to a disgustingly dirty apartment, we had to rush to work after freshening up. I felt like I belonged in SQE and did not have to go in search of my calling. Felt just like a pig then ;) entering its sty. It is marvelous how these people can mange to get a place so dirty. And I have to learn something from my roommate; it would be how to maintain clothes. Think about it, you do not wash clothes, and wear the same thing for more than three months, and they do not look worn or dirty. Maybe this is why people like them do not live with their social circle; because then it would become hard to keep up the neat and clean image. I dont like it when i get critical and try to avoid being so, but when things go beyond threshold, I guess I have to let it out to maintain my insanity!


The Middle of Nowhere


That's the middle of Nowhere


And Finally... Hyderabad!