Travelogue by Sanjeev
I have one unforgettable experience and i can assure you the content is 100% ( not 99.99%) true. I may not recall the exact words in the conversations, but as i said the content is pucca.
It was 13 years back in March '96 and i cannot forget this date as my marriage was fixed in April, less than a month away. I had taken up a new job and i had an expat boss with all the appropriate airs, funny accent etc, and to top it he was a Bengali ( i seem to have a curse of bad bosses, that is another story!!!)
We had to travel to Chennai for a meeting. In those days there were not so many airlines with such frequency, so the plan was to fly down to chennai and then after the meeting drive back to Bangalore. So far so good.
Meeting over and we come out. Boss makes a call to check on the taxi to drive us back to bangalore. i am still wondering about what the hell the meeting was all about and not listening to my boss on the phone. after the call he tells me that we will have lunch and come back and have the client organise a transport for us in the meanwhile. my obvious response was that let us wait as the taxi should be reaching us anytime. He replies that it may take more than an hour. first warning bell, but the sound is not yet very loud. you must appreciate my position : new job, new boss with a strange accent and i am still quite wet behind the ears, so i just go along. Lunch over and if i remember correctly the lunch was longer than the meeting. My boss i realised was a big eater on the company account, and that is another story! anyway back to the client office and waiting for the taxi.
boss again calls and this time i hear the word "Srini". now Srini is a secretary and man friday for these execs and he sits in bangalore. i am quite confused by now and want to know why this joker is calling bangalore for a taxi to take us from chennai to bangalore. well this idiot has asked for a taxi to come from bangalore to pick us up in chennai!!!! for me it was a jaw dropping moment and i just could not believe the stupidity of this guy. when i stop at this point in the story everyone who has listened to me so far calls me stupid!!!! after 13 years and lots of self analysis i still do not know why people call me stupid at this point !!! anyway let me move along as i have just completed part 1 of the story!!
Now comes the even more interesting part. car comes, driver is apologetic. those days we did not have the golden quadrilateral and these beautiful toll highways. It was still mutliple by passes, bad roads etc... we get in, it is about 3:30 and by the time we reached the Chennai exit time was close to 5:00 PM. And BANG, the driver runs the taxi into a large stone on the road. we get down, investigate and driver says he did not SEE the stone!! this is where in my opinion i make the first of my bad moves. The driver was quite short, so i suggest a cushion for him to get the necessary elevation that he can see the road. I meant it as a joke, but my boss seconds it. cushion found, setup and driver sits on it and is ready to go. That damn idiot of my boss had still not got it and i am just getting a glimpse of a disaster in the making. You may know there is a position called "cleaner" which these travel guys keep. And their job is exactly as in that name. These guys at the travel agency finding no driver and under severe pressure from my company had sent a cleaner. apparently my boss had this brainwave to get a cab from blore just before he got into the plane to Chennai!!!
The journey continues, the driver's skills(well as he is not a driver in the first place you cannot blame him for his lack of skills!!) and he is completely clueless about the route. As a rule when i travel i have my booze ready and i was getting high, slow and easy as we were anyway seeing a lot of Tamil Nadu. The most hilarious incident was on one occasion he drove very fast in one stretch, suddenly braked and did a U TURN and came back the way we had gone. I simply burst out laughing and sipped more vigorously. On top of it, night was falling and whenever he saw any oncoming headlights the guy used to start weaving the car. My boss was laying bricks, i was quite high and had given up worrying.
Well we reached Bangalore at 5:30 in the morning of the next day after an approximately 12+ hour drive from Chennai and me thinking that my wife-to-be must have done a lot of punya in her previous birth(S) to nail me( although she now begs to disagree!!)