Picnic @ Andheri

I have a new found hobby… watching local trains while eating burgers. I will tell u how to have a great picnic in pursuing this interesting past time… and it really helps as a stress reliever especially after a grueling placement session and you are in the mood to make a hurried rush home to get back that lost energy…

First choose the right city… it has to be a great city like Mumbai where you have a lot of narrow roads to convert into one ways for the light vehicles like autos and bikes, but you can let the buses pass through them… make sure that all these roads are generously sprinkled with potholes… ideal setting is heavy rains and all the potholes filled with slush and other yuck… but a post rain road will also do…

And the station should be miles away like Dadar for example and you should be catching the local at a place like the Andheri station… and since you are not willing to waste 4 hours traveling in the comfort of the cab, you leave enough time to catch the train to your home; say about 1 hour… hostel to local train station should take about 20minutes, and from their to the outbound trains station some 20 minutes… so we actually have a contingency planning for about 20minutes when you leave with the luxury of 1 hour ahead of the departure time…

Make sure you have some loose cash… this helps make some rash decisions… like jumping out of the rick hoping that your other ticket mates would be in a position to carry the luggage… it also helps to follow blind and stupid instructions like buying the dinner while waiting for the rest of the ticket’s shareholders to arrive… also helps to find a “very” helpful water conserving vada pav vendor to help wash the slush on the trousers…

Another helpful factor is to carry a lot of luggage… and also heavy ones at that… this helps in generating that appetite for the dinner bought in the previous paragraph, by lugging it up and down the foot over-bridges and dodging hurdles like mindless people who pop out of nowhere like in a video game… unfortunately you don’t have the laser ray gun to vaporize them… and they don’t just stop with an “ow”… a great speech follows…

Once you reach the platform on which you hope to board the train, stand at the place where there is the maximum probability of either first class coaches or the ladies only coaches come to a stop… actually this is not too much of a problem, because it is statistically proven by a great visionary called Murphy that it is going to happen that way wherever we stand… though I would like to assume that god loves me and wants me to travel either first class or with all those lovely ladies, I am not willing to take that risk and trust someone I have not seen all my life… to me Murphy is the known devil and god the unknown angel…

All said and done, you should find a place to sit… so wait until the crowd clears and empties itself into the local train… now you will find a good clean stone bench to sit on the platform… but the reaction should be fast and you must plonk onto it fast before the next batch of the crowd for the next train comes in…

So, now that you have got yourself a nice cozy location at the local station from where you can watch trains come in and go out, pile up the luggage in front of you and start eating the burgers (you have done the cost benefit analysis and found that by the time you reach Dadar, the train would have left anyway)… it is an amazing and exhilarating feeling – eating burgers with a lot of ketchup while the train towards your home is chugging along on its journey without you some 20 minutes away… you feel real light hearted because you are doing something really worthwhile instead of traveling home… and you actually observe the crowd thinning out in the subsequent trains (after your home train’s departure time).

PS. Some hypocrites may actually call this bad time management… but that is not true… we only say they don’t stop to appreciate the little pleasures of life…