Oh ya ya yae..

Shaklespura, when you ask someone like Raghavendran (An adorable comical character) he might pronounce it Shakala-pakala-pur, but when you reach there you will realize it is just not Shakala-pakala-pur, but as the locals say,  Shakala-Aishwarya-Pur. You just need a pair of eyes, to realize this fact.

Shaklespura, is a some town in the Hasan district of Karnataka which is bounteously blessed by God by the negation of nothing. My Rods and Cones just saw ‘color green’ for two days other than my thirteen brown Indian friends.

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Until four in the evening of 19^th may, the thought of going for a trip never struck my mind and it wasn’t a new thing for my class to pack-up backs once in a while for someplace. And being one among the abstainers in the class Google groups threads about the “trip”, the trip fever never really got me.

After a daylong meeting and data, I started from office by 6.30 and even before that my fellow eagles started giving calls and texts asking me to come home early. Vishnu (A long haired man) was at eagles that day and he already started suffering from Vishnu-trip syndrome which is a healthy mix of dull face, irritating talks, frequent use of toilet and many more.  Sometimes, I stay away from him during trips just because of this. ;)

Atlast overcoming all the Friday night Bangalore traffic, I reached home by 7; I had a hot water bath to overcome the beer hangover caused by the Thurday night’s party meanwhile the guys started gossiping about everything in this as the group had Shivram (You might know about yourself, but he knows and he gossips).

The souls of Shivram (My ‘Manga’ partner and roommate) and Vishnu became restless by 7.35 as my 30 long minutes of search for my earphones never seemed to end. I heard a shout “Bus starts by 9.30,  varriya illaya”.  Search failed. We started.

We started from Eagles-nest by 7.55 and got hold of an auto as soon as we stepped out.  And because of the “late start” according to Shivram we had to skip our dinner at the “next-to-home” Saravana Bhavan (SB). During all the 45 minutes of the journey, I was reasoning out Shivram why it was a bad decision. One of the hypothesis was, “Say Richie, if we had spent 20 minutes at SB for eating our dinner we would have started by 8.25 and we could have reached by 9.00 as almost all the traffic would have abated by that time. Now look at us, it is 8 and the traffic is high and we have started. Now we will reach by 9.10, no big difference. In place where we could have spent 20 minutes for dinner, we are going to just skip or finish with lays or biscuits”. I could vividly see Shivram sarcastically smiling to Vishnu of my statement. What would I do, I verbally abused him for that.

Alas, we got down at Majestic from auto and we got into the intra-state bus depot for checking out the bus and by 8.45, the bus hadn’t even reached the bus-stand. And the call to Daniel (The trip organizer) revealed that the bus is supposed to start by 10 and not by 9.30 he initially told. After cursing Daniel a bit, we thought we need some good chicken dinner to subdue our appetite and for which we asked the local auto-drivers to suggest us someplace for most-waand the unanimous shout was “Sudha mess”.

After learning the direction from the auto-man we started moving towards our destination without thinking twice. We had to take a very small lane where you can all generations of men peeing on the lane, our heart said “No, not the right place” but we could see Food-God was standing before us and calling.  Our legs moved. Our nostrils could feel the aroma of pepper that was in the air, I have heard that GPS could pin-point with 10 meters precision, but I should tell you this heavenly smell directly took me the vessel in which it was left. In a food-house, where a bowl of rice is priced at sixteen bucks, we three of ate for 300 bucks where there is no menu card and nothing other than rice and roti’s. But I should say, “It was something! Yes, Karnataka was born for this reason.” To subdue the effect of the spice left in the tongue, we ate two Bananas each and started walking.

And thus for me, the adventure began with good food.

We traced back the path though, but the quantum of crowd flow was increasing by every nano-seconds. We just yanked and hoicked, the crowd that was flowing in the opposite direction, at that time all I could think was the red painted Rajahamsa bus that would take us to the far west. We had planned prior to dinner to visit the place where bus is parked in order to avoid the last minute hustle and it served us as we reached the place just before 5 minutes.

I saw an orange-saffron tshirt man whose hands were holding the belts of the bag right around the chest. That required no thinking, I called Shivram and said, “See, Rakama is walking. We got them”. 

To be Continued..