Domain Maximus

As I do every few months I was cleaning out my music CDs and DVDs today. They have a habit of getting into the wrong cases and then finally disappear without a trace especially if they are very expensive or rare. While doing this I noticed something peculiar. Peculiar because I am an engineer MBA and, as everyone knows, engineer MBAs like the sort of music they can listen to while lounging on grass and breathing in fresh clean air and, especially, vice versa. But wait. I actually have albums by people like:

Enigma
Bryan Adams
Dire Straits
Boyzone
Bon Jovi
Yanni
The Bee Gees
Hootie and the Blowfish
Boney M etc. etc.

While I completely detest Metallica, Iron Maiden and all of those types and have nothing by them. Even when it comes to Pink Floyd I can hardly stand just a couple of tracks (Gasp! You say?). I find most of the songs just too weird. To me it all sounds like:

(Deep booming sound)

Completely wasted guy: Coming intooh the dahrkness…

(Twang… boom)

Anywhere-ere-ere but where you are… are…are (echo echo)

(Crash… shuffle shuffle… pouring water…)

Light is where the truth begins to gargle

(Crash… tinkle tinkle… bang…)

The smoke is green… or blue… even (very grave vocals…) magentaaaaaahhhhhh (climax then fade)

Repeat

You get the picture right. But I also find Raveena Tandon very hot, Celina Jaitley an eyesore and I positively adore Amisha Patel. Nothing makes my heebie-jeebies go hubba-hubba like Kareena Kapoor. Is this a problem? Will I become socially outcast? Am I abnormal?

I am scared… scared… scared… scared… (Twang!… CRASH)

Aurangabad, incidentally, is known as “The Optic Fiber Capital of India”. However when we asked one of the locals why it was so i.e. “Aurangabad ko ‘The Optic Fiber Capital of India’ kyon bolti hain?” he told us, in a somewhat complicated marathi accent, that the omelette walah did not come till 6 am. We nodded and left. Later we entered the Aurangabad bus stand and, in the bus stand restaurant, resolved to order breakfast. The waiter gave us a menu and we started ordering. At the mention of each item he nodded his head. No. Not available. Poha? No. Bonda? No. Bhajiya? No. Misal Pav? No. So what do you have? Nothing. Only tea. Kitchen is closed. Thank you.

We boarded a bus for Lonar a little past 6 am and were surprised at how comfortable the bus was. The seats were well padded and the ride was very comfortable. However we were still hungry, had no food and I noted that only one of the tour party seemed to be sleeping contentedly. And then I noted that the India Today Food Special I had brought along was missing. Hmm.

As the trip progressed we noticed something peculiar about the dietary habits of the locals. Apparently the staple diet of the locals in central Maharashtra is alu bondas and various bhajiyas. And they serve this from dawn to dusk. Now I do not mean to not appreciate this diet, I am sure there are traditional reasons why this diet is preferred, but to the outsider it was a little hard to digest. Every stopover we were served nothing but tea and deep fried vegetables. It was so bad we could have easily played that schooltime game with the locals:

What’s for breakfast?

Bonda Bhajiya

Whats for lunch?

Bonda Bhajiya

Whats for dinner?

Bonda Bhajiya

What is your name?

Bonda Bhajiya

Ha! Got you!

An other alarming trend was the complete inability to use Hindi as a medium of communication as we went more and more into the rugged heartland. After a point even the marathi became very difficult to understand. However after much shaking and rattling and bonda eating we reached the village of Lonar in Buldhana district. We had reached our destination. Well almost.

I walked over to the nearest shop and asked the old man for our final target. “Bhai saab yeh hypervelocity basaltic meteoric crater aapko pata hai?” He blinked. I then spread out the palm of one hand and made a ball of the other and, drawing a graceful trajectory, slammed one into the other. He smiled and nodded, went into his shop, and handed me a nice little plate of Bondas and Bhajiyas.

But soon we saw a sign board for the MTDC hotel, where we were to stay, and began to walk. We had carried with us a Lonely Planet guide and it gave us some idea of what we were about to face. A brisk walk to the crater it said. We began to briskly walk and after some distance we saw another sign board which told us to take a right from the main road and walk for another two kilometers. So it was no surprise that as we walked we all concluded it would have been much simpler if the meteorite had landed near a major railway station or airport or in South Bombay and would have been much easier to explore. But try telling the MTDC that.

Anyways we reached in due course and checked into the hotel. Right across the road, was quite literally, the biggest hole in the ground I have ever seen. It was some 150 meters in depth and almost two kilometers across. One moment you are walking by the road tanning slowly into an apricot and then the next moment you are standing looking over one of the biggest craters in the world. Breathtaking indeed. We rejoiced and decided to do our first trek a little after lunch when the sun went down.

There was no power in the hotel. This was a minor issue however and we bathed and freshened up and dropped into the MTDC restaurant which, the board outside proclaimed, was open from 6 AM to 11 PM. And right now, at noon, it undoubtedly was. However we once again must doff our hats at the MTDC and its commitment to the exact meaning of every word it uses. In this case, ‘open’. Open, most popular linguists agree, does not mean ‘you can eat here’. Merely that the doors are open and you may enter. We entered the restaurant and asked the waiter “Boss khan ke liya kya hai?”. He thought for a moment nodded “Ok” and left. Never to be seen again.

We were facing that marathi problem again. We finally located a more helpful fellow who told us that the restaurant was closed and lunch would be served at 2:00 PM. Not a morsel before. Finally we had lunch and walked out across the road to descend into the crater. It was a most arduous journey and sapped most of our energy but by the time we reached the edge of the crater the sun had mellowed somewhat.

Finally we gathered enough courage to descend. The crater, incidentally, has twelve ancient temples inside and our guide books told us it was almost entirely untouched by the modern human hand inside. A most surreal experience it was sure to be. We trekked to the bottom through perilous slopes and over craggy merciless rocks and finally made it. The lake at the bottom is super alkaline and has a pH of 10.5 or so. Or, as they call it in Chennai, tap water. No sign of any other human beings yet. We decided to trek around the shallow lake at the bottom.

A few temples later we came across a bunch of cavorting couples. And to be honest a lot of modern human hand was touching a lot of other modern human things if you know what I mean. But onward we continued letting the couples be and merely taking a few photos for our reference. That is when we bumped into a large metal object that seemed to be making rhythmic thud noises.

A diesel generator? At the bottom of a crater! This was quite unsettling, and smacked of human presence. We happened upon a nice little agricultural setup right in the middle of the crater where they seemed to growing spinach. We sat and watched them at work for sometime and, after the initial shock had passed, sat down to enjoy the rustic pleasure of it all. But this was short-lived as one of the farmers received a phone call to the tune of something by Himesh Reshamiyya and we quickly left.

It was beginning to darken now and the sun was slowly turning in for the day. We quickly located our way back and followed the exact way up the crater as we had come down. We emerged at the top some 4 kilometers away from the hotel. Most of us were gasping for breath from the ascent and walked quite slowly. The locals seemed to think we were foreigners and a particular gentleman walked with us. He was an incessant conversationalist.

Man: Hello?

Us: Hello!

Man: Hello!

Us: Hello?

Man: Ah! Hello!

Us: Ahem… Hello!

After a couple of kilometers, like long-term love affairs that are forced to turn to issues of Cosmo and Playstation, we ran out of things to talk about and the man let us be. We returned to the hotel and decided on our next plan of action. Buy beer.

We bought much beer and the night was full of fun and frolic and we decided that we would wake up early next day morning, say around six, to do a complete trek of the bottom and all the temples. Then we would catch the bus to Aurangabad at around 11:45 AM. We decided to skip the delicacies of the MTDC restaurant and procured dinner from one of Lonar’s best eateries. We were hungry and ate in a hurry and the Dal Tadka left us in a much greater hurry the next day morning.

Back in Aurangabad our plan then was to make a quick visit to the caves at Ellora. But before that lunch beckoned. After two days of eating railway food and deepfry we used the excellent selection of the Lonely Planet guide to Aurangabad. Lunch was a success in so much that we must have wiped out prawn from most of the western Indian seaboard. Suddenly Ellora seemed to far away and we had to settle for the humbler Aurangabad Caves. Built apparently by the same dudes who built the ones at Ellora and some of the ones at Ajanta, these caves are smaller and only number some ten caves. But they offer a great view of Aurangabad city which, because we had climbed up 2.3 million stone stairs to reach to the top and were hyper ventilating, pupil dilating and so on looked magnificent in several shades of colour.

We finally reached the station in time and we quickly dispersed, each person assigned a specific commodity to purchase for the trip like food, beverages and reading material. Now let this be a warning to all, never drink a beer called Zingaro from Lonar. Some of us apparently were still buzzed and in the ensuing confusion we boarded the train with 14 litres of drinking water, two dozen five-star chocolates and 7 copies of the Mid-Day. Suffice to say that by the time we reached Bombay we were well hydrated and buzzing with sugar but we had all done the same Sudoku puzzle 7 to 8 times each.

I was more than pleased when I reached home. It had been a most wonderful trip. I had enjoyed the journey, the trekking and of course the joys of fellowship and sharing. So it was with much glee I entered my house and went into the kitchen to eat something. I opened the still warm food containers to find that my maid had made our weekend special. Bonda and Bhajiya.

Dammit.

Yes it has been a very long time indeed. But as usual I have a set of rather good reasons. Most importantly I have been concentrating on a couple of columns and my book. FYI the book comes along very well and I am proud to say I am almost 50000 words through. (Clap Clap). And it looks like the first draft will get squeezed out end next month. And before you ask it is not a funny book. Well at least not in the Domain Maximus scheme of things. But there are a few jokes in it. But no sex. (Yet.)

As that may be, a couple of interesting things kept my fingers away from the laptop over the last few weekends. Both were journeys out of Bombay. Now by some parameters, like say reaching one’s destination, one was a success and the other a utter disaster, but by other more realistic parameters, like drinking lots of beer, both were first class. Hic.

The first began as a set of innocent instant messages. I was sitting at home on a weekday morning fretting over a particularly turbulent stretch of prose. Inspiration and content seemed to have abandoned me completely. Thankfully my roommate had left for work with his Gmail on auto login and I was deep in thought, research and photo downloading. (Man, did he have a side I did not know of. Literally.) Suddenly I noticed a close friend online and we embarked on a merry little conversation. Suddenly he popped the question. “This weekend. Let us drive to Lonavala. In my car. It will be great fun.” I accepted almost immediately.

Later I would rue the decision. Not because I had not thought it through. But because my friend had grossly misrepresented the terms “drive”, “fun” and, of course, “car”. We left fresh and spiritedly on a Saturday morning at 4:30 in the morning. After what seemed like an hour but was actually one and a half our car began to make noises that were totally out of syllabus. Thankfully, my friend, who was also driving at the time, is a professional rally driver and a car expert. He suddenly slowed the car down and stopped it by the side of the Pune Expressway. Steam was pouring out of the hood of our Honda City. (I must mention at this point that the car was a seventh hand or so and was only a broad approximation of a Honda City. Later we would discover that the only properly functioning part of the car was the dashtop deo.)

My friend, the auto genius, stepped out of the car and propped up the hood. He was immediately engulfed in thick white steam and momentarily looked majestic and heroic. But it soon passed when he walked up to the car and said, and I dont jest when I say he is an expert, “Dude there is a lot of smoke. Shit.” He called me out and decided something drastic had to be done. We rolled up our sleeves. The three other souls in the car snored in support.

Four hours later we were merrily bouncing along the Pune Expressway drinking beer and singing songs, the wind in our face and considerable dust in our eyes. Ahead of us a tow truck pulled as along as we made our way back to a workshop. We ate several vada pavs on the way and slowly even the dashtop deodorant began to fail.

Soon we reached what would prove to be the highlight of our trip. A place called Turbhe. There we handed over our car to a workshop. We described our problem in details to the proprietor. “There was a sudden eruption of steam towards the forward half of the automobile culminating in a rapid loss of forward motion. We suspect it could be a sudden steam eruption locomotion loss problem.” He nodded and smiled wryly at our complete understanding of the issue. We were engineers and were not prepared to let him take us or the car for a ride. (Not that the car would have let him.)

Car repair expenses are remarkably like courting women. The workshop charges you a steep flat fee just to pop the hood but any more exploration pushes expenses exponentially. By the evening we were told that the problem was with something called an air gasket that would cost some 15 rupees to buy. Replacing it would cost another 34000 rupees or so. Apparently the gasket is designed in such a way that you can only replace it by lifting the car on a stand, removing the engine, replacing the pistons, removing all the doors, changing the upholstery and then getting a new paint job. We were not to be fooled and told him to LEAVE THE PAINT JOB ALONE!

Two weekends after that we decided that Lonavla had proved to be too easy a challenge and we should now go to a place called Lonar. For the simpleton Lonar is the site of the world’s largest high-velocity meteorite impact crater in basalt that also had beer shops. In other words a perfect place for a two day weekend trip. The trip involved traveling overnight to Aurangabad and then catching a four hour bus to Lonar. Or so we were told.