Vizag Diary:Conclusion

27th Feb, Monday:5:00 P.M.

We watched a splendid sunset from the Rushikonda beach. Though the sun set over the city sky but the reflection of the sky on the sea was unforgettable. Rushikonda is the most favoured beach in Vizag. This time only Tirthankar and myself were there as the others went to office. We stopped our car near the beach. It was a perfect evening on the beach. Some localities were playing volleyball. Couple of stray dogs was wandering aimlessly. A boy and a girl were sitting forlornly on their chappals beside their motorbike. We walked down along the shore and stopped at a spot from where we can only hear the howling of the sea. We stood there silently for some time and let the sun down behind the hills which surround the city.

After the sunset we came back to the city and decided to check out a new route. We drove straight along the beach road and stopped in front of the Vizag port. We thought of going back initially but then changed the decision. We bypassed it and went straight ahead without asking anyone where the road was going. We noticed that we came into perhaps one of the oldest area of the Vizag. The buildings and the factories there bore the sign of time. We still moved ahead and then stopped near a train line. The surroundings had changed. We were deep inside the industrial area. That was another face of Vizag about which I'd read in my geography books. Vizag port is the most important and thus the busiest port in the east coast. Vizag is famous for steel manufacturing. We saw the factories, trolleys and overhead ropeways. It was quite fascinating to be there. We were thrilled and excited like kids as we discovered a new world. While returning through the narrow and bumpy roads Tirthankar almost made an accident with a huge carrier but luckily we survived.

Vizag Diary:Continued...

27th Feb, Monday:12:00 P.M.

We took the beach road as usual. Tirthankar and myself. But it was pretty crowded. Yesterday was a festival day for the Hindus; Shivaratri. There was a fair in the beach to celebrate the Shivaratri.So people from outside Vizag also thronged here for this purpose. We took an alternative road to avoid the heavy traffic. We went to a supper market for some shopping. It was quite hot and patchy outside. As we were coming back on our way to home through the congested roads, suddenly appeared the sea from the narrow curve of the city. The afternoon sun was smiling all over the sea. It seemed like the water was on fire. The sea looked so gorgeous and vibrant. We stopped the car near a tea-stall. The breeze blowing was cool and refreshing. After having the tea we decided to visit the fair on the beach.

Shivaratri means "the night of Lord Shiva (one of the Hindu Trinity known as Destroyer or Re-producer of life)". According to Hindu Mythology, on this day Shiva was married to Parvati (human avatar of Hindu Godess Durga). For more information on this you can visit http://festivals.tajonline.com/maha-shivaratri.php

The main festival took place on Sunday night. So it was comparatively less crowded and moreover it was lunchtime. A huge Shivalingam was erected on the beach. It would be approximately 10-12 ft. in height and had a diameter of about 6ft. And the Shivalingam was created using small Shivalingams of identical size and colour. Many temporary shanties had been erected on the beach with the help of bamboo sticks, cloth and dried tree leaves. Devotees were taking rest under it in the scorching sun. Many of them were cooling themselves in the sea. People had come from the neighboring states also. Mostly these were poor people from villages.

Business was there too along with the religion. Hawkers were selling products made from seashells and stones; chains, lockets, fancy stuffs. The shops were generally running by a group of people. I went to such a shop and as I was taking photographs, people, from elderly woman to kids, got very curious about my digital camera. I took few snaps and showed the photographs on the LCD display panel of the camera to them. They returned my gesture with such a natural smile that I hadn't seen in a long time. One of the elder in the group asked us, from where had we come. Hearing about Kolkata, he said that they stayed in Kolkata for ten years. They used to sell stuffs made from the skins of squirrels and that sort of animals. After government imposed a ban on selling and purchasing these products, they became jobless and struggling to earn their living. They were virtually traveling with their family across the India for the business.

Government and NGOs these days take care of the animals and forests. There is a widespread awareness about the preservation of forest and wild animals. But there is very little concern for the people who live in forest or earn their living from the forest. They have no other skills to make their livelihood. These people are not poachers. Government and the NGOs working on this kind of projects should also take proper rehabilitation measures for these poor, hapless people.

Vizag Diary:Continued...

26th Feb, Sunday:10:00 p.m.

We headed straight towards Sonora Beach Resort in Aditi's black Corsa. The same group. I was disappointed as the others, once we reached there. An area approximately of a tennis court size was barricaded with tent-clothes and bamboos. Music was too loud and the DJ deserved a kick. Ekta decided to go and check the chaos by herself first. So she entered and came back by the time Abhishek finished his cigarette."The music is all crap. Most of the people are already drunk. There are separate areas for the stags and the couples. Stags are peeping lecherously at the couples. It is dirty out there"- Ekta quipped angrily and headed straight towards the car.

So, what's next? "TDS, where else yaar?" - screamed Tirthankar. "Can we go for a drive in the highway?"- I asked gingerly. Ekta was silent. Aditi and Abhishek then decided, we would have a mix-and-match outing today. We went to TDS first and repeated the yesterday night. Only exception was, I carried my SONY Cybershot digital camera today. We came out after couple of hours. "I'll drive"-announced Ekta. "No" said her sister. "You are drunk". "But only two shots of whiskey and the rest are just beers"-Ekta tried to argue. "I can see that. No more discussion. Get into the car."-Aditi played elder sibling's role perfectly.

Vizag is a small city. We were into the highway in ten minutes. This highway, one of the finest in the country, connects vizag to Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta), my native city in the north and Hyderabad in the south where I have been working at present .The highway is breathtakingly beautiful in the day. In the night it is magnificently charming. Soil is red in this part of the country. Small, broken hills stands like old fortresses on both sides of the road. We were moving in great speed. Some Punjabi Bhangra song was playing in the car's audio system. It turned into a noise from the song after sometime, as it was absolutely silent outside. I asked Aditi to switch it off.

And suddenly the night came inside the car. We stop talking. Rather we could not. We were mesmerised. We could only see the portion of the black, tall reptile like highway in the diffused car light. The night was in a move so was I. Suddenly the eerie feeling of the yesterday morning came back. I was in that state of mind when there appeared a yellow dot on the horizon. It started to grow bigger and it kept on growing. Once it came close I realised it was a huge truck. It whizzed past us. It was so close or may be it appeared like that, I thought. But Aditi was sitting cool. I just peeked at the dashboard and saw we were going between 130-140 km an hour. We went ahead for another half an hour before Abhishek broke the silence by saying "aab waapa's chal (lets go back now)".

I did a stupid thing while coming back. I was feeling a bit suffocated inside the car. So I lowered the glass of the right side rear window and stoop a little bit outside. The stream of air hit me like hell and almost knocked me out of the car. The sound of air was so deafening. I couldn't hear anything. The vision got blur too. For a moment I felt I was flying in the air with the car. Someone told something from inside the car. I couldn't hear anything. And then Tirthankar drag me inside the car and shut the window glass. "What are you doing? Are you trying to kill us all"?- Ekta snapped at me. I was not aware of the fact that it was dangerous to open the glass of the rear window when a car was moving at a speed of more than 100km/hr. The car could be gone out of balance. But before any damage done, we drove back to our home safely. We all dropped at Aditi’s place.

Aditi’s apartment was opposite to the Taj Hotel and along the beach road. Her balcony was bang opposite to the sea. We all sit there. I looked at the sea and saw how a horizon merged into another. It was difficult to figure out whether the stars were twinkling from the surface of the sea or the ships with their tiny lights hanging from the sky? I just could not make out at which line the sky blended into the sea. The crystal clear dark sky with blinking stars emarged from behind our head and landed on the sea in front of us. It’s the seer size of the sky and sea made me numb. The concept of plane looked very confusing to me at that point of time. An absolutely surreal view. It was completely quiet at 3’0 clock in the morning. Only the sound of waves at repeated intervals hit my ears. But after sometime it also became a part of the silence and I couldn’t make the difference. Abhishek started singing “akash bhara surjo tara…”-a great song in Bengali, composed by Rabindranath Tagore. I translated it as far as possible to my non-Bengali friends. We came back to our apartment in the early morning before sunrise and collapsed in the bed immediately.

Vizag Diary: Continued...

25th February, Saturday: 9:00 PM

Abhishek is a tall and moody fellow. Tirthankar is stocky and comical. Both of them work in HSBC's BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) outfit in Vizag as Assistant Managers. I'd stayed with them during my visit in Vizag.We had a plan to go to a newly opened Pub in Vizag. Two others joined us. Aditi, a Manager in HSBC and Abhishek's friend and her sister Ekta, a Manager in HSBC and has pretty eyes. I’d come to know that this unique group visits regularly TDS a.k.a Ten Downing Street, the pub. But we landed up in Chrome, the oldest between the two pubs in Vizag. Raison d’etre -some new DJ, Sanjay Datta. The pub was small and may be a tad too cozy for some of the couples over there. But the music was crap.

The girls decided to move to TDS after a drink. So we followed them in Abhishek's red, old Maruti 800 .The girls lead us in Aditi's black, sleek Opel Corsa.TDS was more spacious than Chrome and it had a small dance floor too. The pub was already geared up for the Saturday bash. We reached there at the right time. Abhishek and Tirthankar moved straight into the pub with a comfort of entering their bedroom. The ladies accompanied me. Unfortunate we were as there was no table available for us. But we managed a table by sharing with a couple. I was told that ninety percent of the people in the pub were HSBC's staff. The music was enthralling. A couple of drinks; Tirthankar, Abhishek and Ekta dashed towards the dance floor. Aditi and myself sit there for another half-an-hour. Gulped one more pitcher of beer. The beats grew louder to our ears. The intermittent flashes of disco lights slipped of from the colorful nails, bare arms and drowsy eyes. We joined the party.

Flashes of lights and beats of sounds all around. People from the rank of senior management to newly recruited fresh graduates; everyone was dancing like there would be no end. Every weekend, they come to the same place and shake their legs with the same tunes and with the same people they work through out the week. May be this way they have formed their social-language to survive in Vizag, which is a small and not-so-happening city. People from all over the country with different cultures and languages have gathered here. They are so far away from their home. In India, which is so big and diverse in cultures, one can find himself alien in other parts of the same country; and most of the people here are below thirties and for some of them its their first job; thrown into the tough and hectic professional life from the casual and fun filled college/university days. Most of them work whole night and sleep the entire day. Yet they don’t crib and refill their energy bottle to work for the entire week from the weekend.

I looked out for my gang members and I found they were busy dancing in the crowd. Then, I spotted Abhishek standing alone in a corner, letting out smokes like a steam engine from his cigarette nonchalantly. I asked him- “what happen?”. Without looking at me he said - “ So much noise around. People are trying to forget themselves and the reality under this jazzy light- so untrue yet so real for this moment”. I tried later to think about his words. What is the reality to these people? They work in a virtual environment. They speak with HSBC’s customers all over the world. Their colleagues were from different parts of India. They have their family, friends and close ones in their native place. Some of them have a family here also. In some cases, where both husband and wife work, they only meet each other in weekends. Reality is a multi-face dragon here and it’s very difficult to identify the original face of the dragon. All the faces change their position randomly.

As the night grew older, the prices of the alcohol shoot up. I was going to buy a bottle of beer, when I found Tirthankar, standing in front of a table. He was dancing and looking around for someone. I thought he was looking for us, searching. So I tried to call him. But I was wrong. To my utter shock, I saw him grabbed two chicken kebabs (deep fried, spicy boneless chicken pieces) from a plate on the table and dispatched in his mouth immediately and again joined the crowd. I wanted to emulate him, not for the food but for the beer and I ended up in a mess. I saw a half-empty beer bottle on the adjacent table.

I gathered all the courage and took a couple of sip from the bottle and then I saw a fat, grumpy face lady approaching towards me with disdain in her eyes. As the thumping sound of her feet coming nearer, I looked out for help around me and saw my friends looking elsewhere with a I-don’t-know-you-kid face. I did the best acting of my life and tried to convince the lady, that it’s a mistake on my part as I thought that was my bottle of beer. She wanted to blurt something before her husband who was not in a mood to wrangle over this petty issue, drag her out from the scene and pushed her into the crowd. “God is kind”-I whispered. Then came my brave friends and the idiots broke into laughter. I joined them too.

Vizag diary

Reader's guide about Visakhapatnam a.k.a Vizag:

-This eastern coastal city of Andhra Pradesh (located at the south-east coast of India) is famous for heavy industry.
-It is famous for it's beaches (Bay of Bengal), hills and valleys as well
-This is the base for Eastern-Naval command of India

Enough! For more info on Visakhapatnam you can log into http://www.visakha.org

25th Feb, Saturday:6:00 AM

I opened my eyes, squinted and closed it immediately for the shining sun stared straight at me. My Legs were folded painfully; one hand in my pocket clutching the mobile phone while the other had been working temporarily as my pillow, I slowly got up from the sixty degree declined seat. The bus was crossing the Godavari river. Godavari is the largest river in the southern India. The view was breathtakingly peaceful. The early-morning mist floated on the bank of the river. But that gray coloured mist had been melted down in the vibrant orange of the river water in the middle, which was painted by the early-morning sun. Wooden boats of various size were patrolling the river for fish. Some people were taking their bath on the river. The bridge is pretty long. The bus took approximatelly five to seven minutes to cross the bridge. There is another parallel bridge over the river for the train.

The bus was moving slowly with a few up and down jerks over the bridge. I had been looking through the glass window of the bus. Everything was in a move so was I; the slow stream of the river, the fish boats, the people there on the bank taking bath and the sun. The motion started to take shape of the river streams, the fish boats, and the people, in a way, that I had never experienced before and I felt myself transfixed on my seat. For a moment an eerie feeling engulfed me; I was in that hypnotized mood when the bus suddenly stopped with a screeching jolt. In the beginning I didn't notice it's rampant and continuous movement as I was still entwined into that eerie feeling. It was in a form of haze. A mixture of white and red in color, that haze became clearer to me gradually. Then my eyes grew big and finally I saw it. It was a white haired dog, run over by some vehicle and lying on the road in a pool of blood. May be the big truck, which was before our bus, I didn’t know; what I knew at that moment was, the dog was still not dead and shaking violently before it's last breath.