Chapter 3: A Foggy Event at Pune

By the time I was posted in Pune for my Central tech Functions stint, I had come to realize the full force of God’s displeasure with my activities here on Earth. The rate at which I was inviting his wrath was worrying me to no end and the following happened as a climax to an especially bad week on earth for me. Well to set the narration rolling, I would like to tell you that somewhere in the middle of my stint in Pune, there came an opportunity for me to go off and visit a certain factory that the company has decided to put up in a place where no-sheep-has-ever-gone-before, a place which sports a very nondescript name called Baddi (Surprisingly, this version of Windows does not recognize Pune as a correct word and cautions for a recheck but is very fine with the mention of Baddi. Strange are the ways of Microsoft). Anyway, I was very happy to be going to Baddi because, the route was via Delhi which meant that I could scoot home for a couple of hours after some 6 odd months on the road. So it was with great glee that I chalked out my itinerary and marked out in perfect detail the events that I would be doing on this trip of mine. I was very disappointed though to find out that Air Sahara does not give the air corridor of flight from Pune to Delhi and that was the only detail that I had missing in my otherwise detailed schedule of events. To put the well made document in a nutshell, I was taking a flight from Pune to Delhi in the morning and spending the afternoon at home before boarding the evening Shatabdi to Chandigarh where I would halt for the night. In the morning, I was due to ride to the site. Now lets get to the events of the actual day….The morning was quite a pleasant one and this should have warned me of the impending doom but well I am a sucker for pleasant mornings. I had packed up for this occasion a full two days in advance and so immaculate was my planning that I was going to be at the airport a full 2 hours before the printed take off. My luck began to backstab me some 2 kilometers from the airport when suddenly the auto I was traveling in became engulfed in a fog so heavy that you could hardly see 5 meters in front. As I stepped into the airport lounge, the first glance at the schedule as enough to make me realize that once again God was in the mood for mischief. The expected time of departure was delayed by about 2 hours because of the fog. My faith that all of this was definitely the doing of the supreme being was further cemented when I could hear the people sitting next to me in the lounge exclaiming that they had been in Pune all their life and nothing like this seemed to cross their memory. And believe me when I say that these people looked the kind who would remember something if and when it happened. The auntiji in question looked the kind that give the Police the accurate description of the framed hero who was seen departing the house of the vamp after she had been murdered by the villain in Bollywood movies. So I was absolutely sure that Pune was experiencing this fog not because of some westerly disturbances as those dastardly news channels would like you to believe but the sole reason for that day’s misfortune was well my presence. As time went by, the expected time of departure changed as if it had taken upon itself the responsibility of showing the current time of Thailand (IST + 2:30). After about a wait of 2 hours at the airport, I saw my delicious lunch at home go abegging in front of my eyes and I was in a situation that if I somehow made it to Delhi, I would have to rush directly to the station to catch the evening train. As some more time went by and the flight got more delayed, I realized to my utter dismay that even if I made it to Delhi, there was no way that I was going to get to Chandigarh in the night. Add to this the fact that I was supposed to deliver a layout of the final plot plan to the Vice President Engineering next morning at Baddi, and you can realize the tremendous force with which my heart was going flip flop.After waiting at the airport for about 8 straight hours, I was finally able to board the plane to Delhi. I had called ahead to make reservations for the next morning train but upon reaching Delhi, I found that the ticket was wait listed. I was spending an amazingly restless night at home dreading the next morning’s showdown with my boss when I decided to check out the status of the ticket on the net. At this very point of time there was some sort of a deal struck between the Weather God and the God of Road and surface transport to elongate my misery (believe me I swear upon the above with all my honour). As luck would have me expect, there was no let up in the constant flow of bad luck and I was left to rue the next morning’s events as well (all the above psycho babble means that my ticket was still waitlisted). Anyway, early next morning I woke up at an ungodly hour and made it wearily to the station and checked the status of my ticket for one final time at the information desk. What followed was entirely contradicting to the run of luck that I had been having recently. My ticket was confirmed!!!!! At this point in time I should have stopped, gazed thoughtfully at that confounded piece of paper in my hand called the railway ticket, looked heavenward, given a thought to the recent events again and doubted the sincerity of the information that was just disseminated to me across the glass counter. But as I told you earlier, I am a sucker for pleasant mornings! Imagine the mother of all horrors that I would have experienced when the name listed against my seat number on the train was spelled as Gaurabh Beg on the reservation chart pasted neatly across the coach body. Immediately scenes from an old DD commercial warning passengers of getting tickets from touts and landing in jail for traveling under false identities flashed in front of eyes and had not the fear of being a no show at an extremely important meeting at the site been more frightening than that of landing in jail, I would have quietly retreated home and laid the matter to rest. But thank someone up there that the final deal between the God of Weather and the Road and surface transport supremo seemed to have broken off due to some differences over the methods to be adopted for my further punishment and somehow with my forehead sweating and my eyes and ears constantly on the lookout for any plainclothes policemen out to haul me to jail, I reached my destination. As I got out of the platform at Chandigarh and looked up to the sky to punch my fists in victory of having got one over the root cause of all this trouble, it rained. It rained for just 4 minutes and it rained with all the biggest water drops that have ever completed the hydrological cycle and it rained with all the force on me till the moment I could board the taxi. So it was he who had the final laugh.