Contradictions....contradictions...contradictions....
life's full of em... you try to avoid em but somehow they'r always there,right in front of ur face...how else would u explain that a meagre 40 kms ride home is twice as long n 100000 times as painful as a 1500 kms flight??? imagine the horror n helplessness that gripped me when a friend of mine who'd started out from the mumbai airport 2 hours back calls me from MDI while i cramped n cranked up, jostle for my mm of space in an unimaginably overcrowded public transport bus..."overcrowded" is actually quite an understatement here...
I wonder why there isnt a seperate published lexicon for them yet...at least poor souls like me would be forewarned of the soon to befall nightmare... Youd have thought oxford,cambride etc had the final say on usage. No Sir. Here in Blue-land, the conductor n his cronies r god. What you might call a crowd,is an emptry space for em. what an engineer might rate 80 seater is actually 200+ squeezer for em. The "bus" assumes titanic proportions in their eyes. Why, the seemingly unnoticable doorsteps themselves bear two dozens. How is another tribute to man's almost limitless capabilities... Haggling with gods is simply not on - thou shalt pay as per his whims. After all, thou are amongst the privileged 200 odd chosen ones in this never ending odyssey - immovably sandwiched amongst a mass of flesh n bones, experiencing an olfactory range of a 1000 odd ineffective deos, talcs & raw perspiration. Not to mention the odd poke in odd places.
What amazes me the most is the "out of body" exprience of the last few passengers, for all they manage upon is a mere toe hold on the last step & a handful of hair, clothing or....well, you'd hear a groan if you grab the groin. Reasonably speakin, these fellas should have been free riders, owing to the sheer unreachability of their positions & the risk theyr takin. However,the cronies, like spiders in their own web manage to glide through hitherto unknown n invisible gaps & crevices amongst the tangled heap of human bodies, emerging to collect its dues like a snake from its hole with its fangs raised. Nadia Comaneci, are ya lookin? This happens only in India.
