The commute - The Jeppiaar years contd.

Now to my commute portion of the story. My assigned bus, as I mentioned earlier, was Route 43 serving T Nagar. It made a stop near the IIT-M campus - which was the last on the route - before turning right on OMR and all the way to Sholinganallur, which in those days was little more than a sleepy suburb with not much going on besides the few colleges that had begun sprouting along the road. Once you crossed Tidel park, there was nothing to suggest that IT was going to flip this area upside down in a few short years. The swathes of swamp land were still swampy. I'm going to sound like my father here but there were actually mango and coconut orchards on the west side of the OMR -- Rajiv Gandhi hadn't lent his name then -- giving way to the occasional house here or a small factory there, including the Aavin dairy at Thoraipakkam that announced its presence with a strong stench. Barring TCS, which had a facility further south of Sholinganallur, the other IT giants hadn’t opened shop yet. And the numerous high-end, luxury, deluxe, state of the art, 10-minutes-from-the-airport apartment monsters were not even a concept.

It was a short walk from our house to the bus stop. I would walk out of our campus, turn around to wave to my mom who would, without fail, stand there till I went out of her line of sight, cross Sardar Patel Road and walk along the CLRI campus wall past an Aavin milk booth to the bus stop. The tea stalls would be open for business and so would the restaurant Vasantha Bhavan. Even as I crossed the road, I could tell what lay ahead. If I could spot my classmate V and a bunch of others standing there, I knew I was OK. In the very early days of my first year, when I was running late, I would hurry, break into a half-run with every intention of boarding that bus. And on those days the bus was leaving just as I reached the bus stop, I would wave and signal for the bus driver's mercy. It worked on a few days and not on the others. Then the teenager in me began to notice that my actions had an audience: members of the opposite sex that had a fantastic view of my mendicancy through the big windscreen. Here is stating a matter of fact. Not all the girls in our bus were exceptionally good looking. But they were girls! (Yes, I hear the shouts of a misogynistic MCP directed at me.) And pleading with the driver in front of girls, no matter how they looked, was not cool on first principles. Period. Not cool at all. Mm hmm...

So I instinctively stopped doing it. Right away. Instead, as the bus passed me, I would turn around and walk casually to the Madhya Kailash traffic signal which was just a short hop from there. The cycles were long and at every red light at that time of the morning, a handful of our college buses would stop. All of a sudden, I could actually pick and choose less crowded buses with available seats and arrive in style. Of course, over the months, you start having a cup of tea with the drivers here, strike up conversations on the sly there and you build a rapport. And lo! No more leaving me behind. No more frantic waving. A look and the driver would actually stop and let me board. It was not bad at all. And in the evenings, I would get off when the bus slowed down at the Madhya Kailash junction rather than go all the way to the bus stop. 

The activities on the bus itself were pretty dull during the entire semester. Most of the students that were doing the long haul would be asleep. The ones awake would either be discussing girls, cricket or movies in no particular order. Sometimes in turns, over and over again. After all it was the 90s: Sachin and Sourav were playing like Gods, Kamal and Rajini hadn't gone haywire and could still turn out good movies, AR Rahman was still making music for Tamilians and Indians, and girls were, well, girls. My good friend R, from T Nagar, maintained a live database of the girl students across two colleges, ranking them, revising their ranks on a daily/weekly basis and documenting the reasons for the ranking changes. And they hire Pricewaterhouse Coopers for the Oscars. Good guy, good times. He did this on all days except those days after an India cricket match when all talk between us would be a critical, statistical analysis of the feats that had been performed the night before. Mind you, this was the 90s when Sachin was at his best. You can imagine the buzz around the key events - the twin centuries by Sachin in Sharjah - desert storm innings and the final of that tournament, the 10/10 by Kumble at the Kotla, the Chennai test defeat against Pakistan, the '99 World Cup fiasco. And then the usual academic stuff too: borrowing lab coats, calculators and set squares for engineering drawing. 

During the semester exams, the bus would transform into a frenetic, throbbing study room on wheels. Notes would be passed down the aisle, the last hour cramming into temporary memory and hurried revisions and the works. The study material was divided into five units for each course. Invariably, revising the fifth unit would be allocated to the 45 minute commute in my case. But I always got motion sickness which, in hindsight, explains my scores.

So four years and may be 4000 miles kms later, my bus commute came to an end. It was time to move on. And move out. Out of Chennai. Out of India.