Vadodara Marathon was too full of people. I think Baroda is full of Agent Smiths who can multiply into a million Agent Smiths because how else can there be 30 fucking thousand people present in a place like Vadodara for a marathon! But then this is what happens when you have a hundred categories the same day – a half marathon, a 15k,  a 5k for under 19, a 5k for above 19, a 3k for kids, a 0.01 meters for retarded aliens and likewise.

Just like in Hyderabad, the half-marathon group was full of men from Police academies. All of them looked the same to me with their cropped hair, full length khadi trousers and orange brownish coloured canvas shoes. Agent Smiths. There was hardly any place even to stretch in the holding area. There was no toilet that had been erected. Agent Smiths don’t need to pee.

The race was supposed to start at 7 but it started only at 7:45 because the CM came late. The other celebs that showed up were Paresh Baba Rao Rawal, the Pathan brothers who play cricket and the out of shape and full of paunch Kapil legendary Dev. There also was the flying Sikh – Milkha Singh but I had only heard about him and never seen him so he didn’t matter. He wasn’t flying anyway. His red turban was kind of cute though. Finally when Godi’s speech ended, the race began.

The first five six kilometers were terrible. I felt very weak. And I wanted to pee. And since I wanted to pee, I didn’t feel like drinking water even when I got thirsty. I felt like giving up. But then, in some time, I found some Agent Smiths peeing here and there and I joined them. By 10k, I was feeling better and finally like the last time (in Delhi), I did the 21 point something kilometer in about five minutes less than 2 hrs.

I had inspired Hanuman to come along who ran in the 5k category. Ali had accompanied us too, even when he was not running. I am sure he would start running soon. I am very contagious.

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One fine day last week the hotel room smelled weird when I returned from work in the evening.  There was something odd about the aroma. The smell of the room freshener or whatever else that had been used, was pretty strong. It smelled nice though. I had never been to a brothel but I guessed it smelled exactly the way it must have smelled in brothels – strong perfumish odour full of sex in the air. I didn’t mind.

Still immersed in the unusual air of the hotel room, lying on the bed and tucked inside a thin blanket, I was reading Shantaram and getting ready to sleep when Singa Patel called me. Singa asked me if I wanted to go out. He didn’t tell me where. It was ten in the night. If you know me, you would know that I am usually not awake beyond such hours. But then it had been a long time since anyone called me randomly at ten in the night to ask if I wanted to go out without even telling me where. I told Singa I would see him in ten minutes.
It was only when I had put my kurta on and was looking for my recently bought Adidas perfume to help me hide the day’s stink radiating from my body that I realized that the goddamn bottle was missing. Fuck. So it had been my bloody perfume stuffing up my nose all this while. The room didn’t just feel like a brothel then – it felt like a brothel where I was the prostitute.

The house-cleaner must have had accidently tipped the bottle down the shelf, the glass must have broken and the liquid must have spilled all over the floor. I decided to do nothing about it. I was sure it must have been an accident and that whoever had done this must have felt terrible. More than that, I wasn’t sure what could be done about it anyway. So I did nothing about it.

As Singa and I drove off in his car, we still didn’t know what we wanted to do – where we wanted to go. As he rode on, we spotted a Barista. We decided to have coffee there. I had coffee. He had tea. And over coffee and tea we talked about life.

‘Sometimes, I wonder what is that we are doing really’, said Singa.

He was talking about consultancy. Singa was over four years older to me. We worked in the same office. I tried answering him.

‘We study and analyze and draft reports with recommendations and way forwards that the client – the various government departments and agencies – may or may not use. Of course it’s a passive work. We have nothing to do with implementation of any schemes or policies or restructuring that we propose. If we want to do that as well – the execution part, we better become bureaucrats or businessmen or politicians or Chief Ministers. That would be so much more active. But if you think about it, most of them who do become Chief Ministers don’t become one because they want to do active work.’.

This is how we drifted from what we – the consultants – were to what the politicians were supposed to be doing. I think Singa kinda agreed with me. It always feels good to realize that what you are doing is not worthless. We were consultants and we were not worthless. Even when we were not the ones responsible for implementing anything that we ever proposed. And then we drifted to Gandhi and Nehru. Singa told me Gandhi was great. He looked at me and then I spoke.

‘I dislike the word great. Gandhi was great. I don’t deny that. But what is so special about Gandhi being great? Gandhi had a talent and he used it for the best purpose that he could find. His talent was to be able to unite Indians for a common purpose, even without being scientifically logical or democratic in approach most of the times. Imagine convincing everyone to get thrashed by Brits without attacking back – that needs an extraordinary talent. You and I can’t pull off such things. Even Nehru couldn’t pull off such things. Nehru was like most of us – scientific and logical. He had his own talent – the talent to set long term visions, the talent to implement short term plans based on scientific systems in place. And it’s not just Gandhi and Nehru. All of us have something special about us – a talent, and all of us who are using our talents for a reason that we think is right, are great men and women. All of us who are working hard and are being honest with ourselves and others are great human beings.

‘I think the reason why a lot of people use the word ‘great’ in such elusive terms is so that every time they don’t do a right thing, they can argue – ‘hey, I am not as great as Gandhi or Nehru or a or b or c. But that’s not true really. They are only choosing not to be great’.

A day or two later, I was checking out of the hotel when one of the house-keepers interrupted me in the lobby – ‘excuse me sir, I am sorry I broke your perfume bottle’.

I liked this. I had not talked about my loss of perfume bottle to anyone in the hotel and I don’t think I would have known who broke it. So I really liked it when out of the blue, this guy suddenly told me it was him. His face was so full of guilt – unnecessary guilt if you ask me. His voice was quivering. When I looked at him, I knew he was as great as Gandhi or Nehru. His talent was in being honest.

‘Ah – it’s okay. Never mind’. I smiled and checked out.

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‘You are someone who can buy a camera of 80k and a cycle of 20k. You are someone so chilled out in life. Guys like you should be in an MBA college and having fun. If not for two years then at least for an year’. Ali was talking to me yesterday. I don’t know what made him assume I wasn’t planning to do an MBA at the first place. Almost all these guys with whom or under whom I work with are MBAs. Like Hanuman for example. He is my boss.

After taking up my job last year, I had first met Hanuman in Bhubaneswar. Hanuman had read a lot of my Shitoons because on the first or second day of my joining I had declared that I blogged in my introductory mail. Hanuman had replied back asking me for the link to the blog. I had sent him the link and that’s how he had read a lot of my Shitoons.

‘Your true calling is something else. What are you doing here in consultancy’? He had asked me. I was glad that he was not present when I was being interviewed in the campus a few months ago for this job. I wouldn’t have known what to reply. Or maybe I would have. I might have blurted out some random shit like what ‘appeared’ to be my true calling was only a goddman good hobby and nothing more than that. Actually, I think I did say some random shit like that to some questions from someone on that interview day. All of us say random shit in interviews for consultancy jobs. One can’t be a consultant if one cannot even come with some random shit that sounds pretty convincing and logical and research backed and all that.

So when I first met Hanuman after taking up the job and he asked me this red-ants-crawling-on-your-butt question about true calling and all that, and as I was contemplating on a shitty answer, I somehow felt that Hanuman didn’t quite look like the kind of guy to whom one really needed to throw random shit at. I decided to be nice with him. I think I just smiled in response. I also think that he smiled back and we understood each other.

If you think about it, consultancy never is a true-fucking-calling anyway for anyone. A consultant is a consultant because he / she likes being paid to offer advice to the payer. Almost always the advice comes in the form of WORD or PPT files. Almost always the advice is backed on few complicated and incomprehensible macro enabled Excel Sheets. Almost always the Excel Sheets are filled with data found from Google. Consultancy is very cool as long as you never bother to think too much about it.

The problem with truth is that you never know if it really is the truth. Same goes for true calling. These days, I feel like becoming a writer. Writing funny exotic touching books feels like the true calling these days. I am talking about the kind of books that make the readers cry, puke and wank off at the same time. The kind of books that inspire the readers to run nude in the middle of the night to chase ugly brown coloured skinny street dogs. It would be nice to write a book that sets the world crazy. Living would be more fun that way. I would feel more at home.

Every time I go to a book-shop and see a copy of STAY HUNGRY STAY FOOLISH, I feel very happy. I feel happy about the fact that my art-work is in public display all the time. I think I feel happier than Rashmi herself. Rashmi wrote the goddman book while I only designed the cover. Many ask me what was there to design in there? It is always difficult to explain. I love them who don’t ask anything. And I don’t try to explain anything to them who ask. Rashmi had called up day before. She was in Bhubaneswar. This was weird because while she was in Bhubanewar, giving some lecture in the INFOSYS campus, I was in Ahmedabad, headed towards no other place but her ex-campus – IIMA. No, not to study there but on an official trip.

Anyway, so yeah, I was fooling around in a Crossword yesterday when I noticed a Gujarati Version of SHSF lying somewhere. The cover looked so funny in Gujarati that I felt like picking up the book and screaming ‘Gandhiji ki jai’ right there in the crowded bookshop. I didn’t do that. I picked up an Ahmedabad road-map and a ‘Learn Gujarati in One Month’ instead. Yay – I would now speak Gujarat in 30 days. LOLy doesn’t think so. LOLy knows Gujarati. She went all LOL when I tried some sentences on her and asked me to trash the book. She said I was speaking all rubbish. I told her – ‘garje gadherane bap kaheva pare’, what cannot be cured must be endured. She said I was hopeless. I told her – ‘jyaan sudhi shwaas tyaan sudhi aash’ – while there is life, there is hope. She gave up. Ha ha. Funny life. But yeah, I am kinda lonely when alone and sometimes wish I there was some romance in my life. Let’s see.

PS: this post was written yesterday

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I wouldn’t say I lost my way while running today in Ahmedabad. I have never lost my way while running. Nobody loses his / her way when running. You have to be a loser to lose your way when running and loser’s can’t run.

What I would say instead is that I couldn’t take the path that I had earlier marked on gmap. I realized this after like forty minutes of running. So I had to ask for directions. You don’t ask for directions only when you are lost. Sometimes it’s important to be sure. Especially if you are running.

I could reach back the hotel only after one hour fifteen minutes of running. Had I been able to stick to the marked track, I should have reached in 50 minutes. I have no idea how much I ran. The good thing is, I finally ran in Ahmedabad.

I know that I had declared that I would go running last Friday itself. Like an asshole, I just gave it a miss and then next day, I and some of my colleagues were off to Mt. Abu. I didn’t really know Mt. Abu was so close and all that to Ahmedabad but hey, it is! I remember being there a long long time ago when Papa had taken the family on a tour of Rajasthan.  I also remember that it was in Mt. Abu that I learnt what OMNI was. It was a white coloured taxi and I asked Papa what the word OMNI written on the front of the van meant and he told me it was the name of the van. It’s weird why I remember such vague things but I do. I need to dig out my baal-awastha ke pictures from Mt. Abu the next time I am home. It’s been a long time since I have been home. Om shanti Om. LOL – just like that.

I probably would have given running a miss today again had LoLy not called up early in the morning. She called up and told me she was off to Chennai from Bangalore. It was quite some time after six and I told her I found it funny that there was no sun outside. I was thinking more on the lines of an out of a blue ’solar-eclipse’ but she was quick to make me realize that unlike Orissa, Gujarat was on the west. Finally, decent light showed up only by 6:45. Roads gathered decent traffic by seven. I am shifting my hotel today and I hope that the new running route that I finalize is a little devoid of traffic in the mornings. Let me tell you something about the way traffic moves here in Ahmedabad.

The city is full of intersections. Many cities and towns are full of intersections – so nothing special there but the funny thing about Ahmedabad is that most of the intersections neither have a signal nor traffic police-men/women. All vehicles rush towards an intersection at the same time and yet, there never is any jam or clog. The trick is in the eye-contact. You have to win the first right of way by the sheer intensity of your gaze clubbed obviously with the size and speed of your machine. And the city is so good at it that vehicles seamlessly pass through each other at all the intersections. Even when they don’t actually pass through each other, the effect is the same. I was reading a ToI front page article today that praised the recently introduced BRTS. The article used a phrase that best captures the traffic flow in Ahmedabad – ‘bumper to bumper’.

Alright, before I stop, here is a link to some ‘bumper’ pics from the Mt. Abu weekend trip.

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Yo maan – I know I look scary, but WTF, I was like 100 meters before the finish line and didn’t want to give a damn to how I would look in a photo. Keep getting scared for rest of the month.

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To begin with, I had never been a smoker. Back in 2006, I was someone who could write posts like this, and expect all his friends who smoked, to quit smoking on reading such posts. And then within an year, in 2007, there was a post titled: Why you should smoke. Yes, I was a smoker now. Something had happened in Feb that year and I was a smoker now.

During my smoking years, I kept talking about how smoking wasn’t all that addictive and how easy it was to take short-breaks once in a while. And then one fine day, I quit smoking. So what exactly went wrong?

Before I begin, all that I write here is personal. My reasons are mine and not generic.

Smoking or not smoking is a very cultural thing if you ask me. The culture that brought me up had no space for smoking. And so I grew up assuming that smoking was not a ‘good thing’. Like a chutia I believed smoking to be a ‘bad thing’ for many many years – simply because I had been told so. Vague statistics appearing in newspapers from time to time were enough to convince me about the authenticity of my conditioned views about smoking. I never ever bothered to read a single medical journal to actually find out the truth. But then, I am happy that one day, I stopped being a conditioned chutiya. I am happy that one day, I finally took that first drag. I can never ever regret that I fagged as much as I wanted to. Fagging didn’t fuck my lungs. It never proved to be addictive. And it did not prove to be ‘injurious to health’.

Why the fuck did I quit then?

My addiction for running started demanding so much from my body that I had no space for cigarettes. That’s it. It is as simple as that. I did never need to tell myself: ‘Shit man, you are smoking too fucking much. It’s time you quit’. I am no example to someone who thinks he / she is addicted to smoking and is looking forward to get rid of the ‘bad habit’.

There were many days, when I simply didn’t have the time or energy to smoke. There were days when I had to tell myself: ‘dude, been ages since you last smoked – you should go out and grab a sutta‘. When this started happening often, I decided to simply quit smoking. Suddenly I never needed to remind myself to smoke. Suddenly there was no need to think if it was a good idea to smoke on a particular day given that there was a run scheduled for next morning. And thus, life became simpler.

When I think of it, I guess I was probably born a non-smoker and even when I tried my best to fill my lungs with smoke, I could never succeed. Every time someone tells me how cool it is that I have quit smoking, I never understand what so cool really is.

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