Jalgaon - Self Realisation.

Just went on a trip with my Area Manager to Jalgaon. It is a town about two fifty kilometers away from Nashik, a town that is about 300 kilometers from Mumbai, that is about three thousand kilometers from Delhi and so on and so forth.

There were no train tickets available, so booked a couple of seats in a "luxury" bus. Non Air Conditioned and seats from hell. Started off at night hoping to reach by early morning. Grab couple of hours of sleep and then attack the seminar like the very devils. By the prerogative of being my boss, he cornered the window seat. The bus was late and then we started at around 10 p.m. We still had a window of a couple of hours before the seminar.

Then we embarked on a trip of self realization. I really discovered what a great conversationalist I am that day. One moment he is awake and the next, bang asleep. I spent the whole of next day trying to discover the magic sentence that turned him out like a candle in the wind!

When I realized that my comments and intellectual treatises were falling on deaf ears, I decided to make myself comfortable and go to sleep. But, darn it, when can you ever sleep when you really need it? Suddenly this guy wakes up sneezing and everything and I discover that he has a dust allergy and can't take the window anymore, so we exchange seats and miracle or miracles, I fall asleep.

The next thing I know is that our great Sol is shining on my face and my boss is greatly worried. I ask him where we are and what we are doing there and he replies that we were stuck in a traffic jam outside Nashik for about five hours in the night and yes the strange clicking sound I was hearing in my dreams was him biting his nails to the quick.

Now this guy is really wrought up because the seminar cannot start without him and we are already about three hours late. The driver on guessing our predicament, then starts stopping for everything from breakfast, to fuel, to admiring the morning scenery and cool breeze.

Before my boss could start gnawing on his fingers, with my great presence of mind, I remind him to call our colleague and ask him to hold fort. Then I suggest getting coffee and breakfast at the pit stop. We place the order and start talking shop, when our neighbor in the bus orders breakfast. He gets it and we are still waiting. So call the owner of the restaurant and guess what? No more breakfast. Being too polite to bash him up, we just utter a few choice multi lingual and multi racial swear words and drink our coffee and leave.

Then our colleague calls up and tells us that only five people have turned up for the seminar. Cannot back out now so we put our best grins and rush to the hotel. We greet our colleague and ask him to distract the people, saying we will join him in about 15 minutes. Rush to the shower and get ready. Thank fully no surprises there.

We hurry to the seminar and start it. I really do not have much work out there, so am relegated to collecting information about the people who have attended so we can follow up later. I do that and get to meet the people really up close. There is this girl whose father is in the Government or something and she is really ogling my boss! He is saying to me, I am married and why is she looking at me so? That too with her Pops sitting next to her!

I move on and there is this cute little family. The mother and father have come with their deaf child. Now the child is as smart as can be, but severely deaf so cannot vocalize clearly at all. Making sounds like Atta, Atta with a huge grin. They have another toddler in the mother's arms.

Now as we all know, children relate quickly to people their equal in mental ages. I discovered that I have much in common with three year olds. Naturally the harassed mother, when she found that I am having so much fun with her kid, turned her completely over to me and gave her full attention to what my colleague was saying on the dais.

Now I have a child roughly my equal in intelligence and who is having a blast on finding a playmate larger than her father. So we end up playing hide and seek, peek a boo, catch my hand, tickle my arm pits and other interesting games of our childhood. Then I discover another trait in me. I cause Micturition Vidyabhusanis.. that for the uninitiated is the urge to pee whenever you are close to me! Thrice in an hour and growing at the rate of two more in the succeeding hours. The mom is so hassled, that she just takes off the child's pants and lets her "go" free. I catch myself just in time wishing that I could be so "free". Such thoughts are dangerously corrupting.

Finally we wrap up the seminar and its actually a better success than we had hoped. Now I think is the time for lunch. But my boss is already missing his wife, (I think the girl gave him the heeby jeebies) so off I am sent to book a cab for us to Nashik, air conditioned, thank you. So after making him poorer by about two grand, we leave for Nashik.

So when I am trying to weave my spell of words, the car starts swaying, swerving and braking hard. Then we go over a bump and I look back and there is a pig twitching on the road and a driver twitching behind the wheel. So I calm him down and when he is slowing down to inspect the damage, my boss is leaning out of the window, telling him that there is no damage and to move on.

We reach Nashik by about seven thirty p.m. Definitely time for lunch, as you can guess he had not allowed the driver to stop anywhere in between. My boss was rushing to the cab stand so we could move on to Mumbai, but I put my foot down and dragged him to the nearest hotel so we could eat. While I was ordering, he disappeared out of sight and arrived huffing just when food was being brought to the table. I cocked an eyebrow and he said that there are cabs available and we need to rush to beat the jam back. I told him that it was Saturday night and all the people of the world were sitting down to their beers and tandooris, but he would not listen. A Brahman finding food after twenty hours and was still forced to force it down his throat. I think his karma is really going to suffer because of that for reincarnations to come.

Finished dinner and then rushed to the stand. Booked the whole cab to discover that we are Rs.300 short. Before any one can say anything, he hares off to the nearest rickshaw stand and goes to an ATM. Finds one, withdraws money and comes right back.

Have loaded the cab already and when he pays and gets in, tell him that we could have paid in Mumbai or got the cab to go to the ATM and paid him there. When he hears that, all he does is ask the driver to make the trip without any pit stops whatever. Hey Ram! I do not know about the rest of you people, but AC cars always make me want to pee at least once in every couple of hours and its a five hour journey!

Somehow I get him to agree to a stop and go lighten myself. Then using the magic of my conversation, I manage to put him to sleep. I nod off myself and before we know it, we are in Chembur, Mumbai, which is about fifteen kilometers from my home, which is about seven kilometers from Downtown and all that.

Therefore, I conclude at the end of the whole shebang that,

1. I can put grown men to sleep with the power of my words.
2. I can make small kids pee with the power of my presence!

All hail VibhuDaBrahman!
Alark Niranjan!