5 modes of transport, 15 hours of travel, upmteen amount of patience and a Training that was worth it all ...

Back to my blogs after a long long time now! Life had become boring in the last few weeks, same old hectic routine ... I was too busy but nothing really mentionable happening! But this "unhappening" phase came to a very memorable(!!!) ending this weekend. Well this is going to turn out to be another looooong blog ... but I hope the content deserves the size!

Needless to mention, I was in Pune over the weekend. I had to reach Hyderabad early on Monday morning because I was scheduled to attend a training course by David Soloman on Windows Internals on Monday, Tuesday and yesterday! It was a full-time training and covered the Windows architectural details and its evolution thru 2000, XP and 2003. Listening to David LIVE was indeed a great opportunity and I did not want to miss it at any cost.

So for the return journey I booked a ticket for a Volvo that is run by the Andhra Pradesh Department of Tourism! Being a government vehicle, it is known to be very reliable (surprised?? Dont be ... Talk to Mr. Naidu who is resposible for this change). For the last 8-9 times that I had taken this bus it took me to Hyderabad safely in max 9 hours (a distance of 534 km.). So depending on past experience I booked seats for me and a friend (Suyog) in the same bus. The bus started sharp on time - Sunday night 9.30 pm from Pune! So I thought I would be home in Hyderabad by 6.30am on Monday morning. Unfortunately, destiny had other plans ahead this time. :(

At around 2.00 am in the night the bus halted. I woke up and thought that it is a casual stop where the two drivers of the bus change duties. So I got down for a call of nature and went back to my seat trying to get some sleep. That time I noticed that the AC in the bus was not working! That usually does not happen. Usually even when they halt the bus for a cup of tea for the drivers or for any other reason the AC is kept on. When I got down again I saw a milestone that said that Hyderabad was still 400+ km ahead which meant that the bus had travelled only around 100km in 4-5 hours!!! Something somewhere had surely gone wrong! So I went to one of the bus drivers ...

Me: Driver, kya hua hai yaar ... itni der se gadi kyun ruki hai yahan pe?
Driver: Sahab gadi ke turbo ki waat lagi hai, gadi nahi chalegi.
Me: Matlab?
Driver: Woh gadi ka turbo hota hai na woh ud gaya hai, isliye gadi aage nahi jayegi ...
Me (Realizing that the argument was going no where): To ab hum kya kare?
Driver: Maine Hyderabad phone lagaya hai, woh log dusri gadi bhejenge, us mein chale jayenge.
Me: Oye, Hyderabad se gadi yahan aane mein ki subah ho jayegi, hum kab Hyderabad jayenge, kab office jayenge
Driver: Shaam ho jayegi sahab
Me: Dusri gadi Pune se jaldi nahi aayegi kya?
Driver: Aayegi na sahab, ek gadi aayegi, usme jagah hogi to fit kara doonga.

The argument was going absolutely nowhere. I realized that we had to make some moves ourselves. I called Suyog out of the bus with the luggage so that we could try and get into the next bus that is going towards Hyderabad. Surprisingly, as the driver had said another AP tourism volvo came from Pune towards Hyderabad. But it was a ray of hope that didn't shine too long! The bus already was overfull because it was carrying its own passengers PLUS passengers from another bus that had broken down in Pune itself! Phew!!!!

After a long wait a couple of private buses stopped by and offered to give us a lift! Condition - we had to travel in the cabin of the bus, sitting next to the driver and cleaner! Wow! We had no choice, as luck might call it - we were on the receiving end! It was a bus belonging to "Sahara Travels" which I had never taken before! We paid him 100 bucks each and got into the cabin. In the cabin which is around 8 feet long and 6 feet wide, which also contains parts of the bus' automotives, the driver seat, the entrance inside the bus and many more things - there we were NINE of us, scrambled, barely managing to get our bottoms placed somewhere, totally sleepless!!

Thankfully this bus speeded pretty fast. Solapur, Omerga etc. passed quickly and by 6.00 in the morning we had crossed over to Karnataka. Things started getting better when some passengers in the bus alighted from the bus and we got a decent place to sit somewhere in Karnataka! The bus crossed Zaheerabad in AP and it was looking that I would barely be able to reach office by 9.00 - 9.30, that too directly from the bus, not even managing to go home for a wash! I thought ... well so be it! Anything for the seminar! I called up a few colleagues in office and made sure that though I will be late I will surely attend the training and that my seat should not be passed on to someone waitlisted.

But that was not the end of bad times. A little ahead from Zaheerabad (around 60 km away from Hyderabad) the Sahara Travels Bus Driver came to know that some ocrtoi officers are raiding buses ahead and he just refused to move any further because of a fear of being caught! And there we were not even in a proper town place from where we could take a bus to Hyderabad! Suddenly the feeling dawned on me that I had missed the training I was so desparate for and knowing that it does not happen too frequently in India only made the feeling worse. So much so that I had started becoming totally numb, not feeling bad at all at that point in time. Because after all there was nothing much left that could have gone wrong! That I think was the height of ill-luck!

But we could not staying there and crying about it, we had to reach Hyderabad. We tried a few buses going towards Hyderabad but they were full to the brim! Finally after a lot of time we managed to get a 6-seater rickshaw (tam-tam as it is called in Pune) which dropped up just on the border of Hyderabad city. From there we took a public transport bus which got us to the city and I reach home around 12.00 noon on Monday!!!

I got ready and reached office ready to get back to the boring routine! But there was a surprise waiting for me ... David's flight to Hyderabad was delayed due to fog problems and only 1 hour of the course had been covered! And also my seat in the training was NOT given away to someone waitlisted :) ... Yesssssss ... there is GOD!!! And he does not have his eyes closed - proven again!!! :) I ran (probably the fasted in the last few years ;) ) and talked to David. Without any hesitation he agreed that I could attend the course from that point on and even offered to help me at the end of the day's course in case I was not clear on some things!!

And it wont be wrong if I said that the past Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were the best of classromm training I have EVER attened! Most of David's seminars/trainings are recorded as videos and people in the company have access to them. But a live classroom is always different! And that too from a person who has studied Windows inside out and even knows the team well - it was totally different!!! During the seminar he makes comments like "Dave Cutler's philosophy behind this decision way back in NT times was ... ". It was illuminating to learn the internals of the most widely used OS in the world and its evolution from NT ... 2000 ... XP to 2003! (WELL ... I know many people will jump here and start an argument on whether the "most widely used" or "most popular" terms are correct here ... but that is NOT my central point here at all!! We can take that on some other time)

So in the end when I thought over it yesterday ... the experience on travelling from Pune to Hyderabad using a Government Volvo, a (octroi-not-cleared) private bus's cabin, a tam-tam, a Muncipal Corporation of Hyderabad Public Bus and a rickshaw and then getting to attend a great seminar like that ... I think it was worth it!! After all good things do come at a cost :)


The David Soloman Windows Internals Training class