Hiya!

Thanks for all the nice pings and mails and comments of appreciation. Honestly, it was humbling!I never knew so many people missed me here. I suppose it wouldn’t be possible to maintain the same frequency of posts but I’ll try to keep up. Also, rest assured that I will read all your blogs and comments and mails and tweets and reply to them in due course of time. Also, I see a few new followers. Great choice! :P Thanks again!
--

I’ve been off my blog for twenty days now. For nerds knowing what radioactivity is, my blog is made up of a hyper radioactive material called khuja-lee having a half life of a million years. For the “kewl” junta, it implies that occurrence of a patch of such cessation of activity on my blog is as improbable as KKR winning an IPL match, or even more.

The reason behind this rare phenomenon of ‘judai’ is the occurrence of another phenomenon – Summer Internship. Without going into the details of the experience - which calls for a totally separate blog altogether – it would suffice if I say it’s been a heavenly experience till now.

Some of the retailers I’ve visited for data collection have treated me worse than they treated lepers in Latin America in the 30s. The heat is awesome: I start wondering the moment I find myself not sweating. Scorching sun has suddenly made the back of my neck magically granular. The traffic of Ranchi has raped the gears of my bike so bad that I wish Kieren Pollard hit me for a six everytime I have to crawl at less than ten kmph for ten minutes at a stretch.

Rewinding, the internship commenced at the city of joy (I wonder who called it that first!) – Kolkata. For someone who has lived all his life in one of the most planned towns in India, Kolkata was a synonym for paranoia. And it lived upto the (un)expectations. An account follows.

You know you’re in Kolkata when:

• The cabbies start “bargaining” from Rs. 280 and end up taking passengers for Rs. 80!
• The platform security check-up is a gigantic sham as anyone can bypass it through an eatery on the corner called ‘Comesum’ with two doors!
• The waiting room on the platform is on the second floor with fifty stairs!!!! (Grrrrr)
• The traffic jams every two minutes – right, every two minutes – raise no eyebrows at all: such is the level of acceptance!
• Girls in airtight jeans and more make-up than Shilpa Shetty buy lingerie with their boyfriends on the footpath!
• The crowd makes you think that all of the one billion Indians live in Kolkata!
• You find people crossing the roads running on the zebra crossings!
• You find kids bathing in full shame-shame costumes at the hand pumps by the side of the streets with more than average traffic!
• You sweat like a pig!
• There are no dustbins – AT ALL! The whole city is one big shameful crapbag!
• Everyone, I repeat, everyone smokes!!

God help the city, especially on the grand eve of the biggest festival of all time – an IPL match – when everyone seems to go insane.

Anyway, I guess I’m back on the blog and would be more frequent than the Haley’s Comet from now on. So what have you been upto?