Busing Around

The need to travel has always captured the imagination of the human race. While we race towards faster mobility, the omnipresent bus connects the city like no other.

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circa 1980s

"eddolo, nim ajji maneg hogbeku ivathu !" ( "Get up, we need to go to your grandmother's house today !")

"esht bus hathbeku ?" ( "how many buses do we need to board ?")

"eradu, 7D sikre, ondey" ("Two buses, but if we manage to board the '7D' bus, then it'll be just
one")
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The often repeated sentence at that time, was a cue for me to feign illness and stay back, for it meant a long journey including boarding a series of buses on time, to finally reach my grandmother's house. The 7D bus coming "on time" would turn out to be my prayer and wish for that day, at a time when my vocabulary left a lot to be desired.

Buses in bangalore have one thing in common - they all come late. Hawkers usually used this to their advantage to test commuters patience and their tastebuds. The enchanting smell of groundnuts while ensnaring our senses also helped the hawker make a quick buck. unable to bear my pestering for money my mother would curse the groundnut guy for being so opportunistic while handing me over the 50 paise.

Often buses are victims of their own fame. Much as everyone would like to use the service, it's poor maintenance makes it look like carcass on wheels. Either the seats have been cut mercilessly on the belly to expose its insides or the headlights have long stopped working and are merely reflecting the light from the oncoming traffic. Smoke from the bus is enough to dispel any doubts about us screwing the eco-system, while a dingy looking board in the bus meekly spells out "No Smoking" with a badly drawn skull next to it showing the result if one did. Sitting in the bus is no more advantageous than standing in one, and only makes the person standing more jealous instead of the one sitting any happier.

The need for travelling by bus as a student didnt arise in my case until i started my engineering course, since our Pre-university college was just a stone's throw away, while the school i went to was just a kick away.

My introduction to buses was a rude shock. Travelling alone has not been the strongest of my qualities.

"201 is your bus number, and you'll need to get down at banashankari 3rd stage", my father repeated for the nth time, like he was giving a minute by minute weather update that was subject to change.

Scared out my boots, i mentally summed up the number to see if it was lucky for me...rats !! 3 can't be lucky i thought, given that the '201' bus was an all-rounder, literally.

Being one of those buses which travelled the length and breadth of the city, 201 was more like a jampacked boat of survivors gasping for breath by the time it reached my stop.

The next day, after being already behind schedule, the bus slowly stopped, with passengers dangling precariously to it . I had almost made up my mind to ditch this bus and look for a free-lift, when passengers started boarding off the bus like there was some kind of a bomb scare. I couldn't thank my stars more when the bus was nearly empty in no time, only to realize that it was a ritual commuters followed to let the CO-poisoned passengers stuck inside to get down at their stop. 2 seconds later, there was a mad rush into the bus again ! while i didn't understand what was happening, i was quickly pulled into the bus by an old man who probably thought i was his grandson.

Stuck inside the bus, i lost all hopes of reaching college in one piece.

Jampacked as it is, conductors usually didn't dare to walk the length of the bus due to the danger of suffocating the already dying passengers and also the possibility of being siphoned off by pickpockets. Well the whole bus was so delirious, i'll not be surprised if the pickpocket stole from his own pocket without ever realizing it !

As for me, i could move around in the bus, stuck between people, without the need to touch the floor; such was the gravity defying crowd.

Added to this, the concept of "Women only" seats in buses. While men would haggle and fight the crap out to get a seat in the bus, women would scream their throats out, if anyone as much as dared to even come close to "their" seats....

Travelling by bus did help improve my reflexes though what with the bus driver braking like he was hammering a nail into the floor. The sudden braking would take many off-gaurd and commuters would fall over each other with inertia playing a crucial part in the melee. Newton 'stood' vindicated starkly during these times.

Conductors, as they are called, would do crazy things to fleece money from people....tickets would be more like 2.25, 3.75 rupees which meant we would end up giving 5 rupees expecting a change in return. Instead we would get a ticket with weird markings on it's back denoting the change due, to be collected on reaching his/her stop. Since getting down the bus was as big an event as getting onto one, passengers were forced to forget their change in exchange for their lives many a times.

Dealing with so many people is a task conductors prepare for everyday, by either being completely drunk and marginally coherent, babbling curses or just being plain indifferent to the happenings.

Not all Conductors were bad though, a few had even turned humorous with age. Quite a few of the buses i used to travel used to pass the NIMHANS hospital, famous for housing mentally ill patients. So whenever the bus stopped near the hospital, the conductor would shout out :

"yaar ree illi hutchru, nim stop banthu" ("all those who are mad here, we have reached your stop")

The goverment later introduced buses called "pushpak" which was moderately well built, and a tad bit more pricier than the regular buses, but was crowded no less, and helped people die in peace slowly and luxuriously than the regular buses that worked like cyanide.

Hanging out of a moving bus was a simple pleasure everyone indulged in, sticking their head out trying to get a breather, and on many occasions being their last one too...

If getting a seat in the bus is one tough task, holding on to it is another. prying eyes latch on to you like that of an eagle on it's prey. An inch of visible space near the already occupied seat would immediately be filled up with either a empty tiffin box, or a school bag and a cunning smile from the fellow standing commuter. Its an unwritten rule that expects people sitting in the bus to offer to carry the tons of luggage, including broomsticks, carried by those standing in the bus. I conveniently used this rule to dump all those loads of Engineering drawing paraphernalia onto midgets sitting in the bus, while i enjoyed the scenic beauty outside. Sitting in the bus comes with another disadvantage, that of dozing off to sleep. Nothing can beat the sleep inducing capability of a bus. I for one have dozed off quite a few times only to be woken up as result of my head banging into the seat in front, courtesy the bus driver.

Buses have long been oppressed and punished for no apparent mistake of theirs. While the city fights on whether miss world pageant should be conducted or not, one fool gets this clever idea of pelting the buses and lo behold ! some dozen buses are burnt that day !. While miss world happily enjoys a sumptous evening snack in her beach outfit, buses get stripped off their armor by hooligans !. Buses generally have this tendancy to get into trouble. Awfully late when needed, they are the first to be present in the midst of a simmering riot, more like "AA Bhail mujhe maar" ( "Bull, please hit me") as the saying goes.

All said, buses still provide that necessary link to the city and it's people. It's been a while since i used the bus to travel, but i know that it'll be around when i need one, a few hours late, but it'll be there... busing around..

God Promise !

If there is any time when strong emotions run between god and its student disciples, it should be during exams, and more so on the eve of the results.

Clearly, i have rather been a chicken when it came to exams, and distress calls travelling upwards were shamelessly sent by me at unearthly hours, either to rescue me from a sparse matrix or the 8086 microprocessor. inane as my effort to please god on the 11th hour, i had partly considered then that he was personally responsible for my welfare, and hence preparing for the exams all alone was not what i was prepared to do. God, i insisted, should equally work hard in areas of luck and memory management- exams where he had to come clean every semester.

Exams usually brought out the worst kind of paranoia in me. Starting off with taking a month long hiatus from getting a haircut, before and after the exams, to which side of the bed i got up on the day of the exams, to the grumpy face i would need to wear lest i displease the god of luck. Love for god usually peaked during exams to extraordinary levels, with early morning visits and circling around the temple while my mind shuttled between recalling "system call to create a file in linux" to the number of times i had circled the temple. An inkling of doubt on whether i had completed circling the idols a magic 9 times, would push me towards making another - not the one to displease the gods, and face their wrath.

My mother didn't help the cause either, often advising me to take the entrance to my house that faced east while going for my exams, instead of the main entrance that i usually took. While this was rather a burden, if starting in the east direction gave me luck in the 'analysis of algorithms", i'd rather take it than try acting smart, i reasoned.

God, i observed, seemed to be particularly liberal in fishing out luck for me when i prepared well for the exams. Then again, what's the point in him trying to be goody goody when i had done all the hard work !

Our appetite for cheap methods of obtaining easy-to-read materials was a boon come true for the photocopier-boy. In his late 50s, he spoke in one direction and looked in another direction. That was still better than the peculiar way he used to say "Zeeraax" to denote a photocopy. The 30 paise per copy that he had mastered not only gave us notes for cheap, it came with a stink which even the mongrels standing nearby used to detest. Not the one to take this cheap trick of mine easily, my mother had forced me into hanging all the papers in the balcony, like wet clothes, to drive away the obnoxious phenomenon.

Voracious readers that we were, books were photocopied including the copyright page :) (okay okay, the previous post notwithstanding. Irony has a weird sense of humour). One subject which we had to study went by the name "Computer Ethics and Society" which spoke of copyright infringement, ethics, patents etc., and had three text books for the subject and ironically was probably the most photocopied book ever in our college history. While we read ethics and copyrights to our hearts content, it was insignificant that it was coming from the stinking 30 paise photocopy :D

Exams were tough, and even tougher were the irritating practicals labs. The programs used to be a big dud, but the external examiners were a pain sometimes. Half the ICs and chips in the lab had breathed their last breath, and the other half waiting for salvation. computers looked like they had been beaten to death, with keyboards rampaged by rats. External examiners generally came to labs to have a nice lunch and enjoy the lush greenary in the campus. programs were but a reason, working or not working, examiners went on gut feeling chosing a number between 75-95 if the program worked, and a crossed look if it didn't, with wierd markings on the paper suggesting evil intentions.

While we used to take turns to secretly try and overlook how much they had marked us for the program, it would be the wildest fire on campus that day "who got how much ?"...one fool had come running down to me after the Myu-P lab shouting "Hey that external examiner took down your name and was discussing about you. you are done for good"...well, at that time i didnt know if she was impressed by my program and was trying to find which star i was born in, or she was so pissed off with my answers that she wanted to do some voodoo stuff on me. Not the one to take it without a fight, i made an emergency visit that day to the temple promising god an 'archaney' and a coconut offering, if i scraped through the lab. That i didn't earn money enough even to buy a matchstick was totally unimportant at that hour.

Even funnier is the extent to which lab attendants used to go to rag us, and we inturn them...

one particular lab attendant, a dud by choice, used to berate us :

"Do not keep your book on the processor ! it will get heated !"

one clever guy had convinced him one day by saying :

"no sir, the processor is inside, this is just the cabinet. See it says here 'Intel Inside' !" :D :D..

needless to say, the attender gave us permission to keep our 1gm books on the 'Processor' without much ranting after that !

Invariably every semester had one 'black sheep' subject that would run down our throat like a cacti scared stiff. Most of us used to leave the sleeping beast for the last day, fearing it would take its toll on the other exams. I had resorted to what i did best: doubling up my presence at the temple, just so that god gets a second helping of the carefully picked flowers, and force him to remember my face well enough so that he could recall it while distributing lucky coupons during the exams.

It was the 7th semester .... and there was this particularly tough subject on linux internals. An elective we should have rather not taken, our lecturer had famously tried hard to talk us out of it before we decided to nail each others head with a doornail.

On the day before the exams, plugging my ears with the fattest finger i had, to cut down all extraneous noices, i tried hard to concentrate on the bad omen better and went on :

"the bootstrap program loads into the memory, and that in turn loads the OS."
"the bootstrap program loads into the memory, and that in turn loads the OS."
"the bootstrap program loads into the memory, and that in turn loads the OS."

Hopelessly falling short of memorizing stuff even worth a mark, i tried to do a bit of a Mckenna and decided to picturize the whole page, hoping to remember it like a painting !...that i rushed a couple of telegrams skywards 2 minutes later conclusively proved that not only was Mckenna's 'Photographic memory" a stinking lie, it was a deliberate attempt to influence young impressionable minds.

The day of the exam was one of mayhem and confusion, with half contemplating suicide after the exams, and half not even turning up on time, making us to think if there was a holiday rush to the heavens.

The poop-brain examiner stood on the ramp, emotionless, trying to beleive that he had suddenly acquired a halo, acting like an angel guardian, swooping down on anyone who would dare as much as wink an eye at anyone except him. The need for copying was never so greater with some using their toes( as kiran puts it ) to turn the pages of the book kept on the ground, to a few looking at others desperately for help. I had gone to the exam hall with a certificate-of-visit from 3 temples in the morning, the proof of which lay on my forehead with the 'kunkum' blaring. If god ever passed by, he'd have no reason to say that he didn't notice me.

I had already started emotionally blackmailing god about the consequences of him failing to sail me through this exam. While the coconut, i believed , was a huge temptation for god to grant my prayer, i did have doubts whether i had been stingy in my offering. After 3 hours of writing how linux's ability to screw-up was as good as it's ability to boot-up, i dropped the pen down.

"15+8+12+5+10"... that would be my score for the exam, i mentally calculated...for 50 marks i'd write another operating system, god only had to make the examiner a bit drunk while evaluating my paper. Optimistic as my calculation was , the code i had written for the bootstrap program might as well be used as a virus to infiltrate it.

God would have to choose between me and linux. He had no choice as far as i was concerned.
Spending the holidays until the results were out was a nightmare...any building that even remotely looked like a temple would get a full bow from me, and "Jai hanuman" by Sanjay khan and "ganga mayya" by dayanand sagar suddenly had a avid follower in me.

After months of worship, the d-day arrived, and LI was the only subject anyone cared to check out. One last prayer shooting upwards, clicking the results sheet, the page loaded slowly, as though someone was sitting behind the monitor, virtually painting line by line...

.and then the result showed up !

... FCD !!!! yippppeee !!!!.... Long live the creator, LI had been successfully conquered.....54 it said was my score in linux internals.... i was by now sure that god had given a few extra shots of tequila to my evaluator, while having a vodka-martini himself, before asking the evaluator to evaluate my paper. Linux was now "been there done that !"

While many a Exams came and went, LI brought in more TV ratings to that one-eyed bat ramanand sagar's weekly pain-in-the---- serial than any of his other promotions did.

My fear for exams is still intact, but hopefully god will always be there to save the day :).

I kept my promise with the customary coconut offering, though it was God's Promise in return that had been more alluring !