As the clock starts to bring all its needles together, on the 31st of December, cell phones start beeping, with messages like “Before the network gets jammed...blah blah blah...”, “Here’s wishing you in advance blah blah blah...” and “Mobile operators will charge tomo for free msgs, so...blah blah blah”, my semester vacations had finally come to an end.
It’s a unique experience to board a train on the 1st of January, but probably a bit more than on normal days! My train was scheduled to depart from the Howrah Station at 14.50 hrs. And being the 1st of TwentyTen, calls and msgs had already started to pour in like football fans pouring for a Barcelona FC vs Manchester United FC football match, from different parts of the world. Even as I packed my things in haste, I found myself saying more than a hundred “Happy New Year”s !
The train departed as scheduled from the New Complex of the Howrah Station. I was travelling with my friend Siddharth, while Shamim was in another coach. As usual our talks began and what all things we did during the semester break. On introspection we found that there was a 3rd year guy from MIT in our coupe! As our conversation progressed we got to know that he was in I&C, his dad a prof in E&E and his mom in E&C! He had come to visit Belur Math, Dakhshineshwar and Kali Temple in Calcutta. They had all got separate berths, so when his dad came we were quite surprised, at the same moment shocked, because he was our BET professor in our first sem, Mr Nagaraj! Out of at least a million possibilities we never expected to see him on this train, let alone this part of the country!
Our journey progressed quickly as we ate home-made samosas, pakodas, sandwiches, pastries, chips and puri-bhujia(aloo wali!). The journey from Calcutta to Chennai takes about 26hrs and there are only 7 stops, making it one of the most important trains in Indian Railways (and yes... once in a blue moon its late by even 10 mins). There is a cushion of 7 hrs between the penultimate stop Vijaywada and Chennai, meaning if the train is even 2.30 hrs late at Vijaywada, it can still reach Chennai before time!
We had a near to 3 hr break at the Chennai railway station where we watched the famous advertisements of the man drugging a fellow passenger and stealing his valuables, the famous Saravana Stores ad, and the new Tata Docomo ad! We then had biryani for dinner and boarded the next train to Mangalore (the Mangalore Mail). The Mangalore Mail takes approx 16 hrs from Chennai to Mangalore. It goes down South and travels through Kerela to finally enter Karnataka.
Mangalore is quite famous for its port, and the educational town of Manipal is about 65 kms from it. A bus journey (Express Bus as it is known) takes about 1.30hrs to reach Manipal through the temple town of Udupi. We three then boarded the bus and reached Manipal at 2.00pm. We had a relieving lunch at Dollops and then retired back to our hostels where the cleaning of the room awaited us and the beginning of the new semester.....
