A Tale of two cities

It was the worst of times... period.


(continued from my last post, i know its lame... but...)
You know you’re in trouble when you have to take 3 ricks to get to your work place, at times paying more that what the meter shows. You must have heard of half return rates at night (Bombay people please ignore), but what’s triple (or even quadruple) return!?!?!?! That’s how I used to travel in Pune, i.e. if I was lucky enough to find a rick that was ready to take me to where I wanted to go.

Just my luck, my training had been bangalored (can I use that...?) to CMC Ltd. And this place was in the middle of some industrial kind of area, again, far from my place (Anshu’s bro’s home – henceforth called Solace Park).

We were called (and still are called after one whole frigging year) ITPians ( Initial Training Programmeians :-/ ) and we had to go through Software Engineering Boot Camp - complete with having to take10-15 tests, score 50+% in each, get an aggregate of 60+%, not fail in more than 3 tests, clear any retests in just 1 more attempt, phew..., not cheat, not miss any trainings, etc etc... failing any of which we’d be thrown out. Well I lived through all this and almost topped my batch of fellow ITPians, without even having a PC at the Pune home (Take that TechM!). Does using a cyber café count?

We had to share the training centre with ILPians (Initial Learning Programmeians :-/, is the S/W industry creative or what!) from TCS. Finding out that CMC was an undertaking of TATA wasn’t much of a solace. Obviously the ILPians got the better training rooms (I am just saying that... :P) and better food (I am not just saying that). But we did get whatever was left after their lunch in the make shift canteen.

Found a few friends from college and school among the hordes of ILPians. That was kind of a relief till the day when they finished their training and left for Bombay... Now that was frustrating. I had a good 2 months of training left.

Yes, coming back to Solace Park, it was a great society, swimming pool et al. The only problem with the place was that it fell right in the middle of No man’s land, B.T. Kawade Road, forsaken by the PMC (Pune Municipal Corporation) and feared by the rickshaw-wallas. The excuse for a road outside, a good 1-2 Km stretch on either sides, was basically a bunch of potholes sewn together with a bit of gravel and tar. The place was called Ghorpadi Gaon (notice the Gaon). Right on the first day of training I was splashed with the dirtiest of muck on my way to the training centre, while waiting for a rick, of course. Sign of things to come? All 3 exits from BT Kawde Marg were reinforced with rails, railway tracks that is... All the frigging exits had railway crossings... (Calculate the probability of not having to wait at a particular crossing on a Monday morning for the Udyan Express)

Now I’ll tell you about my social life during those 2 months of training...

That’s about it.

My regular haunts were Satvik (the pure veg. hotel where I ate 93.07% of the time) just outside Solace Park and Worldwide Cybage (the cyber café at its side). Orkut zindabad for those 2 months. I couldn’t afford to stay out late and hope to get a rick back to Ghorpadi, for you see according to the rickshaw wallas the road (they still called it a road) was bad and they couldn’t get back any fares from Ghorpadi (ya right, people who live their sprout wings and fly, they don’t take ricks).

Coming to rickshaw wallas, they are nothing like the ones in Bombay. Outside Solace Park you could get 2 types of rickshaws - the normal ones and the BT Kawde Marg shuttles, the ones that operated only from one end of the road (see I m also calling it a road now, though it almost doesn’t resemble one) to the other. I once had to bribe a rick walla and pay double the amount just to get to the training centre on time for a test ( Rs.110 instead of the normal Rs. 55 :’( ), but at least he agreed to come... Coming back from the centre was much better, only a bus ride followed by wait for a rick or share rick back to Ghorpadi then another one to Ghorpadi Gaon (Gaon). You just mention Ghorpadi to the driver and he would do this maneuver with his face and finally say no anyways. The share rickshaws were truly brutal! They could take in as many passengers as the rickshaw walla could find. There was at least one time when I came in a rick with 7 other people plus the rick driver. Then I had to get down at ghorpadi after which there were a total of eleven people in the rick, ten passengers and the driver. All this in a normal rick. Maaan that’s brutal!!!

Finally back at home I would get back to my favourite pastime, listening to some music and staring at the wall. When you have no TV, no PC, no one to talk to, no nothing, this can be quite fun. Just blank walls to stare at. Then I also had the newspaper - sudoku, kakuro, loop the loop - till about 12 -1 at night. Most of the days I would skip dinner just because I didn’t feel like going out again (that’s why 93.07%)

During those times Neeta and Ambika were the only respite. I would see them everyday and eagerly wait for the weekend.

Thursday was the most awaited day. That was the day I would pack my bag for the weekend trip back to Bombay. And probably that was the only good thing about the whole deal. All the dirty laundry of the week neatly folded (I guess that’s the only thing my mom appreciates about me) stuffed into the Addition (written in the style of Adidas) bag and taken to the training centre the next day with certain amount of pride. And on Fridays at the end of the day, we (a friend from college who used to come back to Bombay every weekend too, and me) would make reservations for bus tickets and hurry to Ambika petrol pump where we got our Neeta Volvo bus (and you were thinking...?) back to Bombay.

The ride back was the most pleasurable experience of all, for lack of a better analogy, just like how you feel when you get to pee after having to hold for, say, two years... (ok I am not good at this, but you get the point). That’s when I fell in love with The Gathering’s album “How to Measure a Planet?”.

The ride back will be another post and soon too, hopefully...

The reverse of all this on Sundays... packing new clothes for the week ahead and stuff...

Then I would leave on Monday mornings back to the mundane sh*t and this continued in a vicious circle for 3 whole months... Friday evenings leave for Bombay, Monday mornings come back again.

Coming to think of it now, I feel I wasn’t staying in Pune and coming back to Bombay on the weekends. It was more like staying in Bombay and going to Pune during the weekdays... what say...?

Part 1: Pune... the Beginning

Part 3: Pune - A Retrospection