Ahoy Ponmudi!

The rain gods had played truant in much of Kerala, and there were hardly any rains at the beginning of monsoon which is usually marked with heavy downpours day in and day out.

So I decided I would go to meet the rain makers themselves by making a pleasure trip to a picturesque hill station near Trivandrum called Ponmudy. Nobody goes there at this time of the year since the heavy fog and pouring rain makes movement difficult not to say that you miss seeing all the scenic views from the "points" due to the heavy fog. But since the rains had been feeble this year, I thought I would not face many problems.

Another point to note is that though Ponmudy is quite near Trivandrum, very few Trivandrum residents, not to say Malayalees themselves, have actually gone there. They would rather prefer to go to Ooty or Kodaikanal but not to Marine Drive at Kochi, Koavalam beach, Silent valley, Athirampuzha(for its waterfalls), Thattecadu (famed for its bird sanctuary) or a tourist resort nearer home. This is something I still don't understand.

I had once before gone to Ponmudy when I was a teen. But that time it was in a small mini bus that made its way up through 22 or so hairpin bends. I remember that whenever a vehicle came from the other direction the vehicle maneuvering the curve from below would back down making leeway for the oncoming one. But it was risking your life either way. One wrong move by the driver and you would be hurtling down the steep precipice which was always present one or the other side of the road.

This trip proved more memorable and an adrenaline pumping one too!

The roads were still the same size; maybe better tarred, but all the same risky to traverse.

The bus that took us up was a full sized KSRTC Anandapuri transport vehicle. Before boarding it, I remember wondering how these behemoths could manage winding up through those treacherous mountain roads where one moment you are moving in one direction and the next, when the bus makes a 360 degree turn on a hairpin bend, you find yourself moving in the completely opposite direction.

But anyone in Kerala would vouchsafe that for a KSRTC driver such work is a piece of cake.

And it was true.

Our driver took a break and had a hearty breakfast at the foothills of Ponmudy before he started on the nerve-wracking trip navigating the curves and bends that led to Ponmudy as if it was just another drive for him. There were some family people too making their way to Ponmudy or back in cars and vans at this off season time of the year, and the KSRTC bus stopped several times to let them pass, backed off at certain curves to make way for them and at one instance another KSRTC bus came hurtling down the opposite direction, but both of them expertly stepped out of each others way and smartly proceeded.

Once at Ponmudy I realised I had made a mistake. It was still late morning and heavy fog covered the hill station. There was nothing to do, see nor anywhere could I move around. My co-passengers on the bus (hardly 2-3 people) straight away headed to the KTDC sponsored Beer bar, others had a heavy lunch at the restaurant, and that was all for them. After it started drizzling mildly they got restless waiting for the return trip back to Trivandrum.

The tourist lodgings at Ponmudy had an unusually large number of visitors at this odd time of the year. But then I noticed they didn't prefer to venture out of their rooms, preferring to sip beer, brandy and whisky and watching the clouds floating across the hills through the fogged up windows of their stay.

The trip back was uneventful except for the fact that I found that my leg had been punctured by a huge leech up there at Ponmudy and that my leg was soaked in blood though there was no pain.

I checked into a hospital, got my legs bandaged and had a course of antibiotics for the next week.

Lesson learnt: If people don't go to Ponmudy during a certain time of the year there might be a good reason for that. Going against the grain may not always work out well. :)

Conductors or Semi-Conductors?

Kerala State Road Transport Coporation was again in the news this time. No, not for breaking the loss-making record again. KSRTC now is paying more money as pension to its employees than the salary it is paying its regular employees.
KSRTC is just another State government tool to ensure employment to a few more people in a state where literacy rates are the highest but the available jobs are among the lowest. Or, was supposed to.
I know a good friend of mine who was a computer instructor at a mediocre computer training institute. The outsorucing boom had just started and software companies were inducting candidates in hordes. Suddenly one fine day my friend said that he had been selected by KSRTC as a bus conductor. And he was accepting the offer.
I was aghast. He was a promising computer engineer who could write reasonable good software and could manage steep learning curves. I tried to change his mind. I told him that with his strong logic and reasonably good exposure to the hot technologies of the time, he would make an excellent software engineer with some real time exposure to software projects. Would not all that talent go to waste?
But he would not budge. He said, his parents considered a goverment job a secure one, with minimal risk and well-paying too. He too agreed with his parents and that was that.
I didn't see him after that.
But whenever I catch the night bus home at 9 pm on Fridays to my native place, I sometimes think of my friend. Where is he? Was he enjoying his work? Or did he turn back to computers again?
My journey lasts 4 hours(half an hour less than in day time due to the empty roads) as it courses most of MC road to my destination. The first one hour the bus is packed with commuters, most of them standing. By the end of the first hour most of the remaining people are seated, the others having gotten down at nearby destinations. The next half hour the bus rumbles on and at the midpoint of the journey where the driver and conductor take a break for a cup of tea and a smoke, the bus empties with only a few dozen Tamil Ayyappa devotees clad in black bound for Sabarimala, the famous religious destination in Pathanamthitta district. They too get down in another half an hour. The remaining one and a half hour the bus rumbles on carrying me and just one or two other odd passengers. When the bus finally reaches its destination there is usually only me and sometimes an odd co-towner.
No wonder KSRTC runs at a loss. All that matters is that the buses be running and the drivers and conductors do their job, passengers or not!

Being Mobile

Road Safety Signs have never stopped to baffle me. Some of them are outright indecipherable, others misleading and many, a big laugh. One of them that comes to my mind right now and that can be seen all over the place is the one which ironically says "Left is right!" How true, if you take that literally. In some countries vehicles ply on the left, in others on the right, in some hot countries, they drive in the shade, I have heard, and in India they have the choice to drive either on the left or on the right based on convenience.
If the traffic police really endorsed the left=right equation, no wonder one has this chaotic situation on our roads.
Yet another quizzical road sign says "Speed has five letters, so has death!" Well so has "birth", I think, sarcastically.
Is the traffic police in our country so completely void of humour that they can't come up with a few witty road safety mottos?
Or does it reflect on their generally illiterate status? One wonders...

Hot wheels

Have you ever been in an accident? Many of you have I guess, at some stage of life, witnessed a ghastly accident. But how many of you were actually were a victim of one and lived to tell the tale?
Well I have.
Kerala has one of the highest average annual injury and death rates in correlation to it's population, perhaps next only to Maharashtra. But Maharashtra is a heavily industrialized state with a corresponding high figure of vehicles on the road. So why Kerala? Food for thought for a demographer. I am digressing from my tale.
I was in Maharashtra in a rural village studying my degree course, returning home in the company sponsored college vehicle that did trips from our colony to the city college and back. The weather was cool for an unusually hot summer. The driver, a hefty man with a huge veerappan moustache was cracking jokes in between pan chewing, spitting and deep laughter, and seemed to be in a generally jolly mood.
Suddenly a tipper lorry approached head on narrowly missing collision. In his confusion, Veerappan moustache sharply swerved left and lost control of the vehicle as the bus slid down the road embankment and continued sliding till it came to rest on its side in a marshy ditch which still had some water from unseasonal rains.
All of us were thrown bodily from our seats to the side on which the bus had come to rest blocking all exits.
Pandemonium broke out within. Some women and little kids shrieked; there were moans and somebody shouted to keep calm. My friend Ajay, reached the rear end of the vehicle and broke open the rear glass pane that had on it painted in large letters "EMERGENCY EXIT". That was cool of him I think, considering the circumstances. All the passengers in the nearly half filled bus made our way out.
Out of the mess, we looked at each other.
I have a deep intuition that in a life and death situation, one always searches for someone he/she holds really true to his/her heart which he/she would not normally express. And I found that I was eyeball-to-eyeball with this cute little college classmate on whom I had a deep crush but was wary of expressing. Was that a proof of some tender feelings?
Someone made a head count and we were relieved that no one was hurt except for a few scratches and one person with a minor injury that had let out a little blood, nothing more serious.
Soon replacement vehicles arrived and ferried us back to the colony and home.
As soon as I reached, I went off to buy a pack of cigarettes and with shaky hands took a few drags at the cigarette.
I wondered what would happen to the driver? Would he get fired for his shoddy driving? Unlikely, coz he was the protege of a worker union leader.
But we noticed something the next day.
The same driver was on his seat the next day, but minus the veerappan moustache. Some sacrifice!!