Jab We "almost went."

I apologise for having disrupted the flow of the ongoing series "No Insti for Dull People" but something came up on the highly eventful night of the 2nd of March.

1st March : 10 am.

Loud knock on the door. Naresh presents a very attractive prospect of a quick (and long overdue) one day trip to Amritsar. I am elated (although my eyes remain closed during the entire conversation) and I pay up for the tickets and spend the whole day planning the schedule and everything.

2nd March : 1 am
All the guys are rounded up and we embark on this journey.Everybody is excited about how pretty the Golden Temple would look with us in the foreground (:D) and how the Wagah border festivities will be the best ever.There is some anxiety in the air when someone mentions that Wagah festivities may have been put on hold for a few days(which is quickly labeled away as unconfirmed and hence "galat" news).But the discussion did do its bit to dampen the enthu a wee bit ("I mean what if he's right....guys I'm dropping if Wagah is closed."--Anonymous)


"The following events occur between 1:15 am and 4 am."

We reach the railway station and are greeted with sweet information that our tickets are "confirmed".This joy is short lived as we find out that our train is delayed by 5 and 1/2 hours ("Bhai saab yeh train hamesha time par ati hai...pata nahi aaj hi itni late kyu ho gayi").....which puts our scheduling to the test. Starting at 7 am just wouldn't do so we quickly cancel those tickets(mistake number 2) and get "General Compartment" tickets for an earlier train which has a more bearable delay(not booking for this train to begin with was mistake number 1 in case you were wondering). Economical setbacks notwithstanding we had decided to see this through.
Plans are drawn how to get into the Reserved compartment and do whatever it takes to get seats for an enjoyable trip since the assumption that there would be no place in general was an acceptable one. A train eventually arrives...and it has the same number as our initial train. This forces us to wonder if Railways decided to play the April fool card a month early.We soon find out that this was in fact coming from Amritsar and unless we wanted to go see the Howrah bridge and Vitoria Memorial, getting on it would not suit our purpose.

Anyways, our new train arrives and we decided to check the general compartment ("Kya pata khali ho....").What we see there is a scene straight out of Swades...people people everywhere.(You could say "What did you expect wise guy" but we'd like to believe there's such a thing as optimism.) So we do the most obvious thing to do...get on the reservation compartment and start looking for the TTE. Unfortunately the Railway police decides that we are some sort of a hooligan batch who have no business to be into the reserved compartment w/o "confirmed seats" and he drives us away..(We tried to talk but the 6'5 burly man with a stick in his hand being authoritative with his words is hard to overlook....especially after he throws a man onto the platform along with his stuff.

That was it...no getting into the reserved compartment..and there was no way we could get into the unreserved ones...even if we wanted to (which to tell the truth none of us did). This train chugs away leaving us stranded at the station.This is when we realise that the 7am train wasn't as bad as it first seemed..only now we no longer had tickets(refer mistake 2).We try to bend the rules as much as possible to see if we could buy them back but the guy in charge makes it amply clear that "Mohar lag gayi hai..serialisation hota hai...aise kaise madad kar du aapki ??" that wouldn't work... He does however mention that at 3:30 am there is a train that we could take to Jallandhar and apparently Jallandhar is just a stone throws distance away from Amritsar.Now the way he asked us to approach getting seats on that train was so diabolical that I will never forget it but pardon me coz I dont think I can quite present that here.

So that would be it then...wait for 3:30 am and then board the train to Jallandhar. An awesome bakar session started ... time flew @ warp speed and soon it was 3:15 am... Ok guys time to go..

Me: Bhaiya ...yeh Himgiri Express kitne baje aur kis platform pe ayegi ??
Puuch Taach Bhaiya : Are haan maine gaat bol diya tha aapko...1st March se woh train Roorkee ke bajaye Hardwar rukne lagi hai....agar aapko woh train pakadni hai to 20 min mein Hardwar pahucho.

(:O)

Killer blow. How the hell do we get to Haridwar (considering that buses dont ply between midnight and 4 am) in 20 mins ?? Amritsar plan drop....Dilli Chalo !

Bus travel to Amritsar was never an option for any of us and since we pledged not to go back to the campus w/o pics of a trip... the next best option was Delhi. High time we had a decent dekko of Delhi and NCR. But KP was unrelenting.... he desperately wanted to see this trip to Amritsar through. So people were coming up with ideas like what if the train slowed down ... we could get on the running train and fir age ki dekhi jayegi... or maybe the driver forgot to not stop at Roorkee...or maybe we could bribe the cabin guy to give it the red signal (we were losing it bu the minute) lets wait for the train to pass us by. A train arrives.... and goes past us before we could say Mississippi.Was this a dream....let me rephrase... wass this a nightmare ??

As it turns out, that wasn't the train we were looking for. The non stopping train had mysteriously gotten 3 hours late all of a sudden. Last draw...next stop Bus-T.We are told at the bus-T that the bus to Ambala is on its way and by the looks of it , the trip would be around 9 hours by bus.Almost a night out followed by a bus journey...I couldnt think how I'd still have enough in me to go sight seeing and be back by the night train. The others decided to go ahead with the bus ride but I gave up. It was not so much as the distance or the bus ride..not even the fact that it might get a bit tiresome ... by then I'd just lost my mood to go.It didnt matter anymore whether we went by bus or a limo...it just didnt feel fun anymore.I was in for Delhi since I had felt the Delhi trip vibe sometime earlier in the evening but it'd be improper for me to ask the rest to abandon the Amritsar plans...all this nonsense deserved something ... something meaningful and satisfying.

I hope the guys have all the fun on the trip, they deserve every bit of it.