Once upon a time, more than two and half decades ago, there lived a kid who was fascinated by comic-book superheroes. Come summer vacations, he would gather all the old Phantom and Mandrake comics at his cousins' place, and read them over and over again, magically being transported to dark jungles in Africa.
During one such carefree year, some marketing genius comes up with an idea. It is a very simple one: Send us 100 wrappers of our chocolate, and you will get a Batman Mask! As best as the grown-up kid can remember, it was
Nutrine Maha Lacto, but he is getting old now, and his memory is no longer as awesome as he remembers it to be. In any case, the kid pesters his father to buy him a chocolate every day. Thankfully, the kid's father is a sensible man and refuses to do such stupid things.
He is constantly looking at ways to collect wrappers, and may have lifted some off the garbage pile at the end of the street. After about 2 weeks of such trauma, he is no where close to the magic number of 100 wrappers. He is this close to giving up, resigning himself to the fact that he is never going to be a night time crime fighting superhero, since he has to be home by 8.30 everyday in any case to finish dinner and sleep by 9.00.
But fortune favours the
brave foolish, so the kid gets a Eureka moment. His younger brother's birthday is coming up, and we have this wonderful tradition of wearing a 'colour dress' to school, and going class to class to distribute chocolates to all our fellow
sufferers students. We also share the chocolates with our kindly neighbours. So, the kid pleads with his parents to buy a whole bag of Nutrine Maha Lacto, and goes home to home, distributing the sweets and insisting they eat it right away and return the wrapper to him.
And thus, 100 wrappers are collected, carefully sorted and counted and re-counted, smoothed over and some of them washed and dried carefully, and the whole lot is put in a nice, big envelope and posted to the address given in the advertisement in the Hindu. And then, he waits. And waits. Everyday, he comes back from school, eager to see whether the old postman uncle has brought his magical crime-fighting mask.
After about a month of rushing back from school everyday to find that the mask has still not come, after days of cribbing about the inefficient postal department, after weeks of wondering whether the kindly postman uncle was secretly a thief who simply stole the mask for his own children, our hero comes back one day to find that THE MASK HAS BEEN DELIVERED!
He eagerly unwraps the package, his arms shaking with unbridled anticipation, only to find.... a single sheet of black cardboard paper, with two eye-holes in them, and two pointy ears, and two holes in the side through which his mom would tie a thread so that he can 'wear' the mask. The kid is too young to realize it, but it was among the first of many such events in his life, events which in his older years, his hostel mates would refer to as the short form of the Kuala Lumpur Police Department.
From that day, the kid has hated, HATED, marketing people and their evil designs to get innocent kids and clueless adults trapped into buying shit they don't need. But that is not the purpose for which I narrate this long winded story. One doesn't relive a traumatic childhood incident 25 years later, simply to vent about evil marketers.
No, ladies and gentlemen, the reason why my brain pulled out this incident is because I went on a holiday to Shimla. On New Year's Eve. With the whole family.
On paper, it sounded like a great idea. A work trip had me traveling to Himachal right after Christmas. I was scheduled to come back on Friday the 29th. Then, I figured, who comes back from a nice, little hill station one day before the New Year weekend. So, I discussed it with my lovely wife (who has decided to continue living with me in spite of my disastrous planning), and we decided that it would be a capital idea, for her and my mom and bro to all fly down to Chandigarh and join me at Shimla, where we would spend the weekend and come back refreshed to tackle the mysterious challenges that 2018 would throw at us.
Hotels were booked, and flight tickets too. Woolen clothes were borrowed from relatives, and my old trekking gear was pulled out from the blackhole that we call our 'bed with storage box'. Cabs were arranged to get the three of them from Chandigarh to Shimla. Colleagues were excited too, saying it always snows in Shimla during New Year's, and we were told that walking hand-in-hand with your loved one along the Ridge with little snowflakes falling around you is a very romantic thing to do.
The work trip was a hard one, but the anticipation of a relaxing weekend helped me cope. And so, the four of us found ourselves in Shimla.
Let me give you a piece of advice. DON'T. EVER. GO. TO. SHIMLA.
I mean sure, the place has some positives, like the Hanuman temple at Jakhoo with a huge Hanuman statue which stands taller than Rio's 'Christ the Redeemer' in terms of sheer size, a couple of nice bakery shops which sell you overpriced cakes, the huge Indian Flag which inspires even an anti-national liberal like me. The weather was nice and pleasant, with the right amount of nip in the air. The hotel we stayed in was super nice, and had arranged a grand New Year's Eve buffet.
But...
I have seen a few hill stations in my life. Never have I seen a shitty place covered with concrete structures all over its slopes be called a hill station. The roads are narrow, and the Mall Road is crowded with shops filled with crooks who try to sell you
'Chingu' shawls, and the place is teeming with loud, drunk and horny Jats on New Year's Eve, making a wholesome nuisance of themselves and the place.
I simply couldn't wait to get out of that place. So, on 1st January, we finished our breakfast early, and decided we would drive out before the drunk Jats woke up from their hangover and tried to kill everyone on the road with their driving. And successfully reached Chandigarh by lunch, only to find that our flight out of Chandigarh was cancelled due to fog.
We decide to make a mad dash to Delhi by road to make our connecting flight from Delhi to Mumbai, only to realize that driving through fog means we are unlikely to make it. Flight tickets are cancelled, humongous amounts of cancellation charges paid, and when we try to book fresh tickets, we encounter the thrill of dynamic surge pricing. We make the bookings in any case, mainly because I just couldn't have spent a moment more than I was required to in that fog-infested land.
We book a flight for 9.40 pm after our driver assures us that he would get us to Delhi airport by 7.30 latest, and I build in my usual 1 hour margin of safety to that. But there are days when Murphy looks at your plans, goes bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha, and proceeds to burn them up and piss on their ashes.
We are delayed by bumper-to-bumper traffic, because I guess the whole city of Delhi had decided to take off for the weekend, and were all coming back the same hour. After frantic calling to multiple friends to figure out the quickest way of reaching the airport, exploring the option of actually getting down near a Metro station and making a dash for it through train, multiple prayers to all the 33 crore gods in the pantheon by my mom, our Sardar driver finally make it to the airport at 8.53 pm. Wahe Guru to you too bro!
Anusha rushes ahead to the counter, I get the luggage and we all reach the line panting like a pack of rabid dogs. Only for the counter guy to say "counter closes 45 minutes before departure, and you are late".
Given that I couldn't have used the usual Delhi residents' counter of "tu jaanta hai kya mera baap kaun hai?" since it is extremely unlikely that the Go Air chap sitting there would have ever had the pleasure of meeting with the gentle, always polite (Late) Mr. Vijayaraghavan, I resorted to the only other trick in my book. I sat back and let Anusha negotiate.
There are a few perks to marrying a smart girl. One of them is that you get your boarding passes even after the counter is closed. And the other is that she doesn't blame you for a disastrous vacation. Or at least, she hasn't blamed me yet. Maybe she is waiting to use this card for an opportune time.
Let's hope not.
The End.
*******************************************************************
PS: And thus, I return to blogging. Whether this will be a one-off rant, or a regular routine, remains to be seen.
Posts
