Nikhil Kulkarni

Part 1 

Oct 23, 2013 | Early Morning

It was a very good week coming to an end. He was eagerly looking forward to the weekend to get some well-deserved time off. He was putting in long hours at work and was feeling quite exhausted, but in a good way. He wasn’t feeling as out of sorts as he was feeling a couple of months back. There were too many things on his mind then and he felt terribly stuck and bottomed out. Things didn’t seem to move at all then. Like that damned train for example.

He had felt that he needed a break and needed time out to figure things out (as advised by his room-mates). He did an elaborate search and conducted extensive research on the places he could travel to. Though not a part of the travel research exercise, he watched The Lunchbox (again on the advice of his room-mates, who told him it would make him feel better). Feel better he definitely did, not so much because of the movie but because he had found the place he would travel to. It was going to be Bhutan! If someone (even though fictional) was going to leave her husband and go to Bhutan to find happiness in life, it might surely be a place where someone like him can find some peace and comfort for a few days before he got back to the rough and tumble of the real world.

When he started to plan the trip, he realized how much he missed traveling and how rusted he had become. Planning a trip is actually more exciting than making one, and finally he had something he was enjoying doing. He was back to his earlier regular haunts – Wikitravel, Tripadvisor, Lonely Planet,  Cleartrip, IRCTC (this one he didn’t enjoy that much),Indimike and a bunch of other travel sites and forums. To his pleasant surprise, he discovered that Bhutan is quite accessible. He could get into Bhutan quite easily! There were Bhutan Country Transport buses from Siliguri and the Bhutanese town at the border, Phuentsholing was only at a 3 hour bus ride from Siliguri. Siliguri was quite accessible from Bangalore as well. What if the journey took almost 3 days, there were direct trains from Bangalore. In fact, he was quite excited about the long train journey. The train would pass all along the East coast of India and pass through many states he hadn’t been to earlier. Tickets were duly booked (IRCTC was surprisingly kind this time!) and some hotels were called up to check on the availability, the weather and some help with the travel plans.

He had even made a list of books that he would read, a playlist of the songs he’d listen to while on the long journey. Just a couple of days before he was to leave, there was a warning of a heavy cyclonic storm in the Indian Ocean and his train was canceled. And all his plans were both blown and  washed away, literally! Now that was the damned train which wouldn’t move.

It turned out that he didn’t need to go all that far to clear his head. After a long time,  he had met Aditya a couple of months back. Aditya was his college senior, a very good friend and the go-to guy for help-me-sort-things-out (a role which they often exchanged for one another). Aditya had recently come back from the US and also wanted to catch up with our man. After a long drinking session at the local Manjunatha Bar(Aditya was tired of drinking in the pubs) and over many cups of hot chocolate by the pool-side at Le Meridien(the coffee shop is open 24 hours), they talked about work, life and their balance(or the lack of it), girls, MBA, marriage (if not they, at their parents had at least started talking about it) and everything else under the moon(which they were looking at after a long time).

Both of them felt they were running too fast in their life, in pursuit of what, they didn’t know. They both felt they were trying to pack in too many things in their heads and thought that they needed to take it slow. They knew they were highly capable and that success, both internal and material, would come to them in due course of time. They had decided to take it a little easy(doesn’t matter if CAT happen this time, it’s not the end of the world), try and absorb more( read more books, listen to more music, watch more movies) and more importantly focus on winning the war than each battle (won’t let irritating bosses and colleagues affect them). Looking at things from a higher view and a long horizon made him feel that all was not lost and he could still get things back on track.

Our man had wandered too far, both in his mind and on the road. It was nearly 8 AM and it was time for him to go back to the house, get ready and head to the office. He had started to go for an early morning walk since that conversation with Aditya and had followed a fairly regular routine. He used to walk for about an hour every day. It helped him listed to and enjoy music, gather his thoughts and think through things. What’s more, there were a couple of pretty faces that made the walk even more enjoyable! He rushed back to the house to be able to make it to the office on time. After all, one of things he wanted to maintain was good timings in the office. There was some strange kind of happiness in being the one of the first persons to reach the office!

Part 2

Oct 23, 2013. Around 9 AM

Newsflash on local news channels.

Anchor: News just coming in. One person has reportedly died after being run over by an unidentified vehicle near a park in Jayanagar. The victim has been identified as Nishant Vardhan aged 26 and was a technology professional.  Eyewitnesses say that he was run over by what appeared to be a mini-bus that carries IT professionals to work, but weren’t able to identify which company’s vehicle that was. The victim appeared to be listening to music while on his walk as earphones were still plugged into his ears when the body was found. He was carried to the nearest hospital where he was declared brought dead. Speaking to News9, DCP Traffic(South Bangalore) Mr. Lakshminarayana said, “Young people should be careful while on the road and not listen to music while walking or driving. Investigation is on in this case and we soon hope to track the vehicle that caused this accident.”

In other news, Bollywood rumour mills are agog with news of Kareena Kapoor being pregnant……