A room-mate, THE Room-mate

Loaded with 40+ kgs of baggage and zero knowledge of French, I took nearly half a day to reach INSA campus and receive the keys to my new flat, after I landed in Lyon on a chilly September morning for a yearlong stay. Curious to experience the comforts of my new home, I opened the door, only to find a guy, half naked, staring at me with extreme embarrassment. It took me a minute to realize that he was my roommate-to-be, who had arrived well in advance and had settled there already. I thanked God for His kindness, for it could've been worse had I opened the door while he was fully naked (for whatever reasons).  

Well, after sheepishly apologizing in English, I introduced myself to him, told him about my native country, about why and how I reached here, my opinions about the suitability of Carla Bruni as the French First lady or Adriana Lima as an IPL cheerleader, and the strengths of Indian football team. I'm quite an extrovert it seems. But my new roommate, by God's grace, knew only Portuguese; English and French being to him what Honoluluian was to me. But since Brazil is known as Brazil in English, I was able to 'decipher' his nationality. And since his name wasn't the most easy to pronounce, I nicknamed him Edd at that very instant and informed him of my decision, fully confident that he could not protest this blatant invasion into his rights of nomenclature. Initially I had thought of calling him Samba, but dropped that idea owing to its racial (and Gabbar-like) connotations and settled for Edd. It went on rather easily till now.

Days passed by and the colors of fall began to decorate the trees all around the campus. Me and Edd found our bonding in the prowess of Google translator, where we spent some time everyday to communicate with each other and discuss French idiosyncracies and academic chores (PS: only the chores, not the academics). Amidst the changing seasons, days and nights, his appearance seemed like a carving of fate on the palette of history. He was was static, the same lean fellow with a black woolen cap and thick layers of woolens covering the upper half of his body, in sharp contrast with the modest pair of grey shorts that clung onto the lower. Plus a pair of jeans which he used to wear over those shorts everytime he had to go out.

Eddy was an introvert of the highest order, and the only Brazilian I knew who did not drink or party. He had very few friends and even they stopped interacting with him perhaps due to his weird behaviour. One day he told me, on Google translator itself, that his father had been a chain smoker and a booze lover and was battling lung cancer in Brazil. He had come here on a scholarship and his sole purpose was to stay here and receive that money so that he could save most of it and get back to Brazil.

He was a pathetic cook. All he knew was to how make a mess out of beef and pork and fill our apartment with its dizzying smell. Being a vegetarian I used to be really pissed in the beginning but slowly I got used to his ways. Often I used to make him eat things that I cooked, and he was wise enough to switch over to Indian cuisine over time.

Edd used to take bath twice daily even when it was snowing outside, and was in the habit of cleaning the whole apartment every other day. I could never figure out whether this habit was attributed to some amphibian origins or was just a cultural adaptation to the life in Amazon rainforests to which he belonged. Nonetheless, my home was clean and glittering all the time, and thanks to his voluntary dedication, I had to work upon that only occasionally.

Once he told me that I was his one and only friend outside of Brazil. That day I decided to add some more people to the list. I introduced him to many of my classmates and other friends, and he became particularly fond of Saurabh, who was the fellow exchangee and my closest friend there. We often used to take Edd along whenever we went out in the city, and his Portuguese skills added good nuisance value to our desi conversations. Edd soon became famous across the campus, as the weird guy who collided with standing cars and goofed up with his plates, his bags and everything else that he lay his hands upon. He was technically more backward than even myself and knew precisely nothing about how to call home. I gave him my VoIP account and it was then that he realized that it wasn't wise to spend 1.6 Euros/min for international phone calls. I love Adriana Lima, the Goddess of intellect.

His hobbies included asking me day's temperature every thirty minutes, narrating stories of El Dorado (of which I never understood even a single word), irritating me with his pathetic French one-liners and getting up at the middle of the night for star gazing. The last of these was particularly frightening, and my house seemed haunted for a while due to this eccentric behaviour. At times I felt that he missed his native place too much and was finding it impossible to spend the remaining months here. Once he started crying while telling me about his family, and this became quite a frequent occurence, especially whenever he used to talk to them on skype. He did not have a laptop so he used mine, and even this was discontinued after I had to leave to spend my last three months in the Alps.
 When I returned, I found him in a rather miserable condition. He had not pulled the curtains up for several weeks and had completely locked himself up inside. I immediately talked to some of his Brazilian acquaintances and insisted upon them to keep an eye on him for the next two months that he had to stay there. We persuaded him to go out and and indulge in some better pursuits to avoid a further deterioriation in his physical and mental health. Still, I was particularly mad the other Brazilian guys who appeared just too selfish to do anything for him.

I left Lyon for India on 10th May. As I bade him goodbye, to my sheer surprise, he jumped up and clung onto me like a 12 year old kid and started crying. This was the last thing I could've expected and I never quite understood what made him do that. I talked to him and left behind a note in French. As I walked away, I too realized that despite all the weirdness and communication gap, he had indeed become my closest friend during this stay, after Saurabh.

We kept exchanging emails for sometime. In July he sent me a message informing me about the demise of his father. Today, two years down the line, his life is slowly limping back on track.

I really need to visit those rainforests of the Amazon someday.

A Day In the Vikings' backyard

Step outside Copenhagen Central station and you immediately begin to feel the grandeur of the Danish capital. Massive buildings with a somewhat simplistic but impressive architecture donning the wide avenues, and numerous canals criss-crossing the city like arteries. The layout of the city was much similar to Eastern European capitals like Prague and Budapest, albeit in a more modest design and colour.

I felt a certain sense of cold and gloom prevailing over the city as we walked, perhaps due to the chilly and cloudy Sunday morning that it was, with few people out on the streets and most of the shops closed. The huge dark buildings only added to that effect. But ignoring this spoiler, we armed ourselves with a map and began our on-foot navigation in the city of spires.

As we explored the streets and walked alongside the canals, I couldn't help getting amazed by the tremendous level of cleanliness and civic sense visible everywhere. Admiring the crystal clear waters of the harbour, we soon found ourselves in the middle of Nyhavn, located alongside a small canal with locks separating it from the main network. Magnificent is the word! Colourful old-style ships lining the canal and a very pretty market located along both its banks - a really good-vibes kind of place, very photogenic and perfect for spending an idyllic day sipping coffee and reading a book.


Luckily, the sun was kind enough to show itself up at the right moment and the bright colours of the ships and the shops soon started basking in the rare glory of a Scandinavian sunshine. This is how in fact the whole Dane country seems to be like. Other Europeans in the dark ages of their history could not have even imagined that these dreaded Vikings of the Baltic Sea would one day park their pirate ships inside tiny canals and embrace the tenets of peace and development to forge a society which would be the envy of the entire world.


But I was instead looking for a legendary statue located somewhere near the old harbor, a spot where a century ago Hans Christian Anderson used to fish herring and compose the beloved fairy tales of his masterpiece, The Little Mermaid. After more than two hours of searching in vain, I found that the original statue had been shifted to China for the ongoing World Expo and a dummy one had been installed at a nearby location. Disappointed with the Chinese, I tried to find solace by clicking pictures of this new (and larger) statue before walking back towards Nyhavn.

Rest of the city was rather ordinary from a traveller's point of view. Too much order, symmetry and macro-level precision tend to squeeze the charm out of a capital. Nevertheless, I was impressed by the royal palace and huge blue-white church located nearby (forgot its name). We spent some time in pissing off the immaculately dressed royal guards of the Queen's palace through our antics, before deciding to leave for lunch. This was a damn expensive city - a backpacker's nightmare! Plus, Denmark is dreaded by all food-lovers, and being a vegetarian here is worse than being bankrupt.

After a stroll through the famous Tivoli Gardens, a short visit to a Danish-Japanese friendship concert and a few clicks of the spire-topped buildings to capture the distinct Danish sense of fluid line and form, we returned back to the station. Here we boarded the express train which took us across the sea into Malmo, over the huge and awe-inspiring Oresund Sea-link. An engineering marvel of this century, this nearly ten km long link comprises of a huge bridge and a tunnel that connect Denmark and Sweden. From Malmo, we caught the night train to Stockholm.

Cosmos Conspires. Only a few months later I got a chance to visit the Shanghai World Expo! And yes, the original Mermaid was indeed there!

A volcano, a strike and the end of history…

It was early spring in 2010, and the last layers of snow had slowly begun to give way to tiny undergrowth in the European meadows. The kaleidoscopic splendor of cherry blossoms, edelweiss, gentians, buttercups and innumerable other wild flowers seemed to have completely offset the gloomy moods of the dark and chilling winter months. And amidst all this display of warmth and radiance, there erupted all of a sudden a mighty volcano in distant Iceland, spewing gigantic plumes of lava and ash over the entire northern Europe and reminding us mortals that it is the Nature that is still calling shots on this planet.

Eyjafjallajökull, this is how that volcano is called in Icelandic (or even Honoluluian). But for me as a traveler, the pronunciation of this word wasn’t really important. What was important, however, was that the entire European airspace had been closed on account of this eruption (picture) and my long and painstakingly planned trip to northern Europe was at stake. And as if to doubly emphasize the universality of Murphy’s Law, the SNCF (the French Railways) had called upon a three day nation-wide strike to protest against one of those issues which no one, whether that be Napoleon, Sarkozy or Paris Hilton, had ever been able to figure out.


“How to get to Denmark?” wrote Francis Fukuyama while discussing his ‘End of History’ thesis. A similar question, albeit in a less abstract formulation, faced me as I stepped out of my home in Grenoble in the French Alps and walked towards the tram station. Copenhagen was to be the first stop of this 10-day trip and it was necessary to land there by next morning if further glitches were to be avoided. So, placing full faith in the cardinal tenets of hitchhiking and arming myself with reels of patience and a sheet of paper, I reached a spot where the city road merged into the national highway network. After about an hour, seeing a rucksack-laden youth flashing “GENEVA” near the gas station, an elderly family stopped and agreed to lift me into Switzerland (picture). Three hours racing past the tunnels and the bridges, and first border crossed!

I met Prashant in Geneva and we hopped onto a train which took us to Basel, at the Swiss-German border. We then boarded a high-speed ICE to Freiburg in Germany, just to take a look around the town before the train to Copenhagen showed up. The town was rather pretty and oozed typical German ambience! A carefully preserved vehicle-free historical centre, beautifully designed trams and Saturday crowd enjoying a warm spring day – all worth a stopover (pictures). So after a few hours of roaming around, clicking pictures and munching on Döner Kebabs and baked local stuff, we came back at the station, only to realize that we were late. :P

Well, a minor scuffle with the railway officials at Freiburg station once again brought us back into the loop and we were allowed to board the next train. This new train was nothing but a long and slow-moving slab of junk that stopped at every third station, and took a whole twenty hours to reach Copenhagen. Late in the night, the trains coming over from Amsterdam and Berlin were also attached to the same Junker, so that a whole lot of gypsies coming from anywhere in Central Europe and going anywhere into Northern Europe were lying everywhere on this train, including the floor and the lobby. Needless to say, this was quite a spectacle by German standards, and provided everyone with an opportunity to collectively sulk over the vagaries of a distant volcano and kill time. At 12 noon next day, the Junker rolled into the chilly and hazy Danish capital.

Make A Difference wins World Summit Youth Award

Make A Difference (MAD) is a youth volunteer network that works with underprivileged children in India. MAD tries to empower children in orphanages, street shelters and poor homes with English, made possible by its education partner: Cambridge University Press. The English project takes learners from starter to intermediate level using Cambridge English for Schools.

Read more at: http://www.youthaward.org/

Right now, close to a 1000 Make A Difference volunteers teach close to 3500 kids in the Indian cities of  Bengaluru, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Chennai, Cochin, Coimbatore, Delhi, Gwalior, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mangalore, Mumbai, Nagpur, Pune, Thiruvananthapuram, Vellore, Vijayawada and Vishakapatnam.

Make A Difference works with the motto of 'Bridging inequality in society through education'. MAD wants to bring about a situation where all children can select a career based on their aspirations and potential rather than on their financial situation or their background.

Only 13% of high schools in India use English as a medium of instruction, yet a child's higher education and future job prospects depend heavily on having it. Access to the Cambridge curriculum will put children on a par with those educated in good schools.

Besides the English project, MAD also has a Placements project running. The Placements wing of Make A Difference focuses on both career specific and general exposure.

The basic aim of the Placements programme is to place the children in the same footing as children from regular homes with regards to experiences and interaction with various walks of life.

A wide range of instructive and informative sessions including visits to hotels, factories, professional colleges as well as enriching experiences such as camps, arts and crafts workshops etc. are conducted.

 MAD is the winner of the Ashoka Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition 2008, and was nominated as the best Medium Category NGO in the Indiya Shines initiative organized by GreatNonProfits.com in 2009. MAD is also a Noble Laureate of the Karamveer Puraskar awarded by ICongo, global fellow of YouthActionNet and Cordes Fellow 2010.

Find MAD at:
Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter

For more details, contact:
Jithin Krishnan, 09176 55 38 45, publicrelations.national@makeadiff.in
Ishita Sharma, 09009213350, isharma.nliu@gmail.com

When in Honolulu, beware of Cops... Because the worst crime is faking it!

continued from the previous post...

So kind-of pissed, I took the metro and then caught the suburban train to take me to my home just outside the city. Since it was to be a 45 minute journey and I was acutely sleep-deprived,

I dozed off…

In my dream, I saw two tall African guys shaking me violently and speaking in Honolulu-ian, “Idiot, the train is standing in the yard, and this ain’t another of your dreams you lazy oriental prick”. Ah okay, so I try to expand my eyeballs like a lemur and begin to identify two hostile dark faces against a completely dark background, and realize that what they said in Honolulu-ian was indeed true.

I think I thanked them for their courtesy, got outside the train and ran away – but where? The yard was huge, and after tracing several paths through the quasi-labyrinth, I arrived at a gate which was locked. A few maneuvers here and there, and I was able to jump out of the yard. There I saw the board – Saint Remy de Chevreuse, which is the terminating point of the RER-B line, 5 stations beyond my place! Left alone at 3 am in a deserted suburb, I felt I should have stayed inside till daybreak...

And then, Murphy never disappoints you, so, here he was back again, in a Police vehicle!

Some guard had probably seen me jumping over the gate and had alerted a police patrol nearby (I guess). I was brashly ordered to stop and freeze and I sheepishly complied – well what else could one do? The cops got hold of me, pushed me against a wall with my back facing them and kind-of tried to neutralize me. I was already feeling like a criminal, but it was more amusing than scary since I was almost sleep-walking due to fatigue. Thankfully, they were polite and one of them spoke English. After routine searches and checks – weapons (I had a Swiss knife), passport, visa and whatever, I was somehow able to convince them of the comedy of errors that had occurred, and they were gracious enough to drop me near my place. HUH!

So, after the whole drama and nightmare (the prospects had seemed really bleak and nightmarish when I was forced against the wall like a thug), I got side my home just before the dawn and slept for 24 hours, like the IIT dogs :P

Incidentally, as I realized later, they speak English in Honolulu…