A Tale of Two Train Rides
Posted on 21 Sep 2009 under Journal/Life Updates, Life, XLRI
It’s 10:50 am. I’m sitting in my room and listening to music from the soundtrack of the game Need for Speed: Underground on my Creative SBS A300 2.1 speaker system with sub-woofer. I’m quite relaxed because there’s no scary deadline in my face, my room-mate is asleep on his bed, and the room is nice and cool. At this moment, life is awesome. I don’t remember the last time life felt good in XLRI. Enjoy it while it lasts, Gurdit. Yeah, those words echoing at the back of my mind make sense.
But you know, yesterday, life wasn’t half as good. The train ride from Hyderabad to Kharagpur (there’s no direct train from Hyderabad to Jamshedpur, where XLRI is located, so we have to take a train to Kharagpur, and then take another one to Jamshedpur) was far from pleasant. The heat was pretty bad at various points, even though the breeze coming in through the window was cool most of the time. I guess it was much hotter in the train because the train was crowded, filled to the brim (and seemingly overflowing slightly). The food, thankfully, wasn’t a problem, because almost all of us got food from home.
Compare all of that to the train ride that was on the way back home. Although we had no packed food and had to eat the (pretty bad) train food, the experience on the whole was a lot better. We had a lot more open space, because there was a much smaller crowd in the train. We slept when we felt like because we pretty much had the entire compartment to ourselves, and we could put the middle berth up whenever we wanted to. The most important thing, I guess, is that there was something to look forward to on the way home—10 days of relaxation and fun. In comparison to that, there’s nothing to look forward to when coming to XL.
Well, ok, I’ll admit…having the aforementioned speakers in the suitcase was a positive thing. It meant that I could listen to music properly and not have to rely on my earphones for it. Apart from that, there’s one more small thing that I am looking forward to this term. You can guess if you want, but I’m pretty sure your guess(es) will be wrong.
Why don’t you just tell us then?
Shhh! Not in public! Don’t you know how NOT private the interwebs is?
I really enjoy reading ur blog, pls keep writing as & when u get time. Also ur poems are very good,love reading them ,You haven’t written since a long time, though.
I hate my monster. tell me what you’re looking forward to!
Ok.
Apparently, this term, XLRI gives out Blackberrys to all its students along with a lifetime subscription to a top-secret NASA magazine that chronicles the discovery of aliens and how we’re trying to domesticate them to facilitate the production of oxygen and liveable conditions on other planets in order to reduce the dependence of human life on this lonely little planet.
The end result is that those of us who have got subscriptions will, in due course of time, when the planets are fit for human habitation, be offered real estate at lowered prices which we’ll be able to afford thanks to the high-paying jobs that XLRI is (hopefully) going to get us when we graduate.
I’m looking forward to life.