So, once again I booked my tickets via Go Air. However, this time it wasn’t a Rs.3,000 return as I got it last month. It was a full 2k more and well, it is well worth it!

I booked the Airlift, which is a really good investment when you are travelling to Bangalore airport which is a good 50+ km from city-limits. My mistake was that I booked the cab for 8am, which arrived earlier than that and I landed up at the airport about 9am! And, as luck would have it, my flight was delayed by a good 30minutes, so my wait at the airport was well over three hours, in which I spent a good amount of time in the Barista at the airport.

It was also interesting to watch people wearing masks all over the airport in fear of contracting H1N1 which seems to have ravaged the country! This was even more in Mumbai which is also one of the epicenters of the pandemic. In my opinion, the whole thing has been overhyped, since, there are more persons dying of other illness than the total suspected H1N1 cases. Anyway, some protection is better than none!

Being Independence day on the 15th, there was extra security checks at the airport. In fact, our luggage was checked twice. Once by the normal security and once by the Go Air personnel. On reaching the plane, there was a lot of confusion and I gathered some information that there was confusion about the number of passengers. We finally took off almost an hour late, but the flight was really smooth and we reached Mumbai rather quickly.

I dozed off on the flight when the exhaustion finally crept up on me! I landed at Mumbai airport and had to walk a small distance to get an autorickshaw guy willing to go by the meter and not trying to fleece me! Gosh! They think I am not from Mumbai!

Found a rickshaw guy home and I first stopped off at my local cable operator to renew the internet connection at home. Marise came over later in the afternoon to spend some quality time with me.

I went to meet Sneha afterwards and Arijit joined us for a quick dinner at Pizza Hut.

And, yesterday was Marise’s birthday celebrations. But, that’s for another post!

Hence, every year ABC sees a stream of students dropping in with their old books. We joined this list of students to sell the books we collected in the past 20 months. Any money is good money!

So, Aditya, Akshat, Sneha and me took the afternoon bus to the city. We were joined by Namrata, who had already sold her books the previous day. Got down and Atur Center and took rickshaws to get to ABC. The moment we alighted we were “received” by book sellers interested in purchasing the books. Boy, can they smell students interested in selling books from afar!

One thing I can’t do is bargain. But luckily for me Namrata and Akshat are the experts at this and Sneha and Aditya can provide decent backup! So, I stood with minimal talking while they bargained and sold all our books for a cool 3K. My share Rs. 600

Show me a college student with loose cash, and I’ll show you a student waiting to spend it!

Since we were free, we headed off to Dhole Patil Road which was a good Rs. 50/- by rickshaw to eat Katti roles, some pastries before realizing we just had nothing to do there!

So, it was back to Atur to catch the bus to Aundh, where we dropped in to Idlicious. We learnt to our surprise that they had stopped serving customers and only offered parcels. The reason: the Pune corporation now only permits those with allocated parking to serve customers. This has resulted in the closure of several restaurants across Pune, including Cafe Coffee Day. So, we picked up parcels and then headed back to college where we ate the idlis.

And, that was the closure of an interesting day

Had originally planned to come back to Mumbai on Thursday itself for Placements work. However, a thought improvement workshop interrupted these plans.

The workshop was conducted by CGN. The workshop is actually a program by The Pacific Institute. I had originally planned on going into details for the same, but I guess most of the same is copyrighted and it would not be correct. In brief, the workshop covers topics like scotomas, Reticular Activating System, Gestalt psychology. In all it was an entertaining three days. We did miss a finance test in the middle, which I would have liked to attend.

Left for Mumbai early Sunday morning and reached there by afternoon. It’s been starting to take too much time traveling to and fro between Mumbai and Pune!

My first job was to clean up the house. Took out the vacuum cleaner that I purchased oh so long back and cleaned up lots of dust from my computer primarily, and then the rest of the house.

Aditya was to stay with me for the entire week while we roamed the city visiting companies. Well, that’s exactly what we did, “roamed the city”.

The next five days were extremely exhausting, with us traveling in all directions, in buses, rickshaws, taxis and more importantly, the local trains of Mumbai. The five day first class tourist pass did not provide that much relief!

Left for Pune last Monday and took well over five hours to get back to college. The journey was extremely frustrating. Caught a volvo at about 9am, which reached Wakad around 1.30pm! I made the mistake of getting down at the Police Chowky, only to find no rickshaws. Had to climb mounds of construction work and walk a good deal to find the tumtums. Would have taken photos but I had my hands full with three heavy bags!

Walked another kilometer or so from the Hinjewadi chowk to college, wondering at every step of the way if I would make it back alive.

Reached my room only to find out that I had a class, which had already begun. Had a quick bath (it was a necessity) and rushed for the class, which was immediately followed by a test.

The rest of this week has been extremely lazy, with a good deal of electricity problems. And, it is the weekend yet again and yet again we are without power for full 48 hours!

Did I mention that in times like these I really really miss Mumbai?

Monday was a strike by private transport operators and as a result our bus didn’t come in the morning. So went all the way to work by rickshaw with my two colleagues.

Work was great on Monday, though I did have to stay late to finish off some of it. Couldn’t get the trax for Airoli because they were full and so came with Mr. Mudit Goel in his Honda City.

Will comment that he was has quite an impressive personality. He too started work in Larsen and Toubro as a GET nearly 20 years back and stayed on. He currently heads International Marketting, a place I would like to work in if I didn’t love design

Anyway, he dropped me and Vinay off at Hirnandani, Powai and I caught a rick back home. Reached by 9.30pm and quickly had dinner and went to sleep by 11pm.

Tuesday was yet another work late. However, it was rather bad because I spent almost the full day in the shop floor and by the time I was leaving my legs were killing me!

Thankfully, there was the trax available, probably because today being Dussera, everyone rushed home early yesterday.

Caught a rick from Airoli straight back home. Thankfully, my company pays for my travel expenses when I work late.

And today is a lazy day. Woke up by 10am only and got online. Don’t really know what I am going to be doing. Probably do some studing…