What If 2

Back in 2007, I wrote a post caled What If about a prediction from an astrologer about my death at Fourty-Two in an air crash.

I am Fourty-Two.

And still flying every other week.

It will be interesting to see if the astrologer was right.

It is a tricky situation. I wouldn't know. But you might.

Remembering Eyyafyatlayokudl

When Eyyafyatlayokudl erupted I was on the way to Budapest, Hungary. I wasn't particularly following the news of the eruption because it didn't matter that much to me. It was a rainy morning in Budapest and the lovely city looked less than occupied. Of all the things, the news of the volcano disrupting air traffic completely escaped me.

But the next day afternoon, when I had reached Bratislava in Slovakia it hit me. There were no planes in the air and no trains where you could get a seat. If you had to be stranded in some place Europe, Bratislava is not the best place. But in a pinch like this, for an escape route, it is a better place than say Vienna or Prague. Because fewer people get stranded in Bratislava.

I ran from the train station to the bus station and back. Bratislava bus station is a communist-era concrete monstrosity that at once is an eye-sore and a deeply unhelpful burocratic prison. Having run from counter to counter, the best answer I could get was that the earliest I could get out of Bratislava was by bus was TWO days from the day.

TWO days!

I went back to the hotel and tried to do something over the web. Slovakian bus lines do not accept international credit cards. I was about to pull the stunt John Cleese did when it occured to me that the best bet in these situations is to revisit the site of escape and stay put until the end of the scene. Either the hero lives or dies...

And I was the hero of my own life. So off I went back to the bus station armed with a ticket for a bus that would leave two days hence.

At 5:00 PM, right before the bus was about to leave, with some additional pursuation in the form of some extra Euros, a seat magically appeared. It was a bus coming from Kraków, Poland. I sat next to a woman infected with a chronic cough. Thus began a twenty-two hour journey by bus through Eastern Europe and Austria.

Unwashed, unslept and unshaven I finally rolled back into town just happy to be back. The only memory of the trip was a rest stop in the middle of nowhere in Austria where the waiters and waitresses in touristy-traditional garb poured hot soup on the bowls concentration camp-style.

Thanks Eyyafyatlayokudl.

Remembering Old Songs

Isn't it interesting how those us who grew up in India carry the strains of Hindi film music in our veins even when we actively not pursue it? There is something absolutely mesmerizing about the way the songs from the 70s and 60s act as the background music to our memories.

I happened to be surfing Youtube and without any forethought started listening to old songs. Raina Beet Jaye in Raag Bhairavi. If anything really makes me sad, this is it. But not sad in a despondent way, but more in a creative I-will-give-all-to-it sort of way. I really wish I could somehow time-travel and rediscover that part of India at that time.

But nothing remains the same. In front of me an old faded photograph of verdant fields outside a North Indian fort that was taken in 1992. That space is now covered up by ugly concrete buildings.

And the background music to those concrete buildings is something I don't quite recognize.

But it is worth remembering. We don't die when we get old, we die when we forget.