vacations!!! got nothing to do...

Whenever there is an exam, lagta hai ki jaldi se exam khatm ho. And once the exam ends, there doesn’t seem any work to do. Obviously one can read books, lekin wo mazaa nahi aata jo exam ke ek din pehle aata hai. After the exams, I left Trivandrum on 02.05.09 for Chennai and I left the same on 03.05.09 for Jamshedpur which I will be leaving on 06.05.09 for Lucknow and finally I expect to reach Gorakhpur on 08.05.09. It being such a diverse itinenary and many interesting things happened on the way. 

The relationship between the mood of passing vendors (selling edibles) and that of my stomach initially remains directly proportional, but after a certain limit becomes inversely proportional. At the cost of former becoming cheerful, the latter becomes upset. One such local vendor came selling something shaped like flattened potato with some jelly-sort-of-thing filled inside. After buying 7 of it for ten bucks, I asked its name. He replied ‘Taadi’. I picked one of them, eager to explore the taste and experience, squeezed only to find that the water inside the fruit fell on my jeans. My fellow-passenger (who spent 2 years in Andhra Pradesh) taking pity on me picked another one showing me how to break it apart. This time the water inside it fell on the novel ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ leaving him uttering arey re re... and embarrassed. Now I took the challenge of drinking the water inside it. But despite my efforts only a few drops of the last piece was I able to savor. 

“Nobody writes about me these days” Yakshi complained. “Now, now, sentences like these are my patents. How can you be so alone? I asked, “Where is hp? Go and I’ll ask him to write something about you. He writes so beautifully, I have appreciated all his works and was quite missing his blogs”.

When hp posted my previous blog in our batch’s blog entitled “South Indian life on a North Indian perspective...”, I became a bit excited, as I've got a new issue (South India) to write about. So, my first visit to South India was in July 2007 when I came to Bangalore (via Chennai) to attend the GD and PI of Bharathidasan Institute of Management. 

The moment I entered kind-of-South-India (there’s no clear-cut boundary separating South and North India), I started feeling a bit different. Movie-posters in regional languages having most of the actors with goggles and moustaches, different actresses, people with mundu (dhoti) and tilak on forehead, Women wearing ghazaras etc. all these factors excited me. At that moment I even started to frame the answer of the question (which might be asked in the interview)- What did you find different in South India?

to be contd...