A Journey with a difference

By

It was a strangely eventful last weekend, one of those that just urges words to form in your head, turn into sentences and knock wildly until you finally let them out. So I guess I’ll have to put down what went through, or at least the part where it all began—my trip from Lausanne in Switzerland to Kaiserslautern, a small town in the middle of nowhere in Germany. It was going to be my first experience in the Eurail and I was excited for more reasons than one. The first leg of the journey didn’t disappoint at all, from Lausanne to Basel, the two and half hours left me gaping out through the gigantic window panes as the train sped past the Swiss countryside. The pristine beauty of the scenery around was unprecedented. Meadows rose from the railway tracks and climbed up the mountain slopes which seemed a stone’s throw away, and the vast expanse of verdure was interrupted in between with lakes and streams gushing by. The small stations in between were quaint with and vividly colorful with flowers—like pictures drawn on a postcard.

When I got down at Basel, I was wondering what more lay ahead of me in this wonderful journey. Next thing I knew, I found myself in a local train crossing the border to Germany. Apparently, a goods train accident and derailment had blocked off the route to Mannheim (an incident which according to one of my German labmates “sounded very much like the German train system”), my next stop. So, a “trainful” of people, including me had to take a detour through the nearby villages, changing trains twice and taking a bus ride in between to reach Freiburg. Now that was supposed to be the end of our ordeal. But it was far from over. We waited at the station, and so did hundreds of other passengers, for the trains to arrive, but they were delayed 10 mins, 20mins, 1 hr and then cancelled altogether. Finally a train did arrive at 12 15 in the night after 3.5 hrs of waiting at Freiburg (the railway stations strangely have no public toilets!!), that was to take us to Frankfurt via Mannheim. When I reached Mannheim at 2:20 in the morning, it was still 2 hrs to the next train to Kaiserslautern. By that time I was quite flushed out, I stood there for a moment in the empty platform, looked at the gloomy faces around, and I said to myself “Bhaad mein jao! I’m taking a cab”. So I booked a taxi to KL. The driver said “I drive very fast on highway at night”—and boy, the next half an hour he was speeding the Mercedes at no less than 160kmph. When at 3 in the morning, just a few blocks away from my destination, the driver diligently stopped at an innocuous traffic light on an utterly deserted road, I could be forgiven for asking the question—“what’d happen if you jumped the light now?” And it took a pretty long time for the inception of this idea that traffic lights can be jumped—apparently he had never thought of it!! If I were Obelix, I’d have gone “tap tap tap…”.

I’d be doing injustice if I were not to mention the people I met along the way, most of all Frank and Judith, two strangers whom I met at Freiburg. Apparently they had also met each other earlier along the way. Judith, a young English woman, who spoke perfect “Oxford English” and Frank, an ex German army man turned businessman, were my company from Freiburg to Mannheim. Talking to them on various topics was the only way I could keep my mind off the situation, which was at times admittedly scary at times, when I started thinking of the gravity of the position I was in—being stranded alone at night in an unknown German town—and how worse it could get.

This journey was worth remembering for many reasons—for all the wrong ones obviously, and then for the people I saw, and the scenes—the huge rainbow I saw while on a bus through a small German village, uninitiated Germans exclaiming at the “huge” crowd ,which would be about the same as that in a normal bus stop in Kolkata; long queues reminiscent of India, and guess what, people trying to jump the queue as well! It was not the Eurotrip of usual, but certainly one that’ll stay with me for a long time. All’s well that ends well they say…

Comments

  1. DeepashreeMay 26, 2011 at 2:00 PM

    Kaiserslautern is NOT in the middle of nowhere!!!! huh!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Biotechnology in India: the placement hurdle

By
This post is a legacy of me being a student of Biotechnology at IIT Kgp till not so long ago. After all the time myself and my fellow students at IIT Kgp spent thinking about this particular topic, I try to analyze here why it is so difficult for a biotechnology graduate in India to find a proper job in the industry that promises so much. The huge stake Indian biotech giants like Cipla and Ranbaxy have on the global generic drugs market is a major contributor to the hype around the Indian biotech scene. But when you look closely, you realize that although India is famed to be the “pharmacy of the third world”, there is very little home-grown innovation and discovery happening in this field! Not to downplay the achievements of Indian pharmaceutical companies, generic drugs manufactured by them are indeed the only medicines affordable in much of Asia and Africa. Taking advantage of India’s weak patent protection laws, Indian companies have thrived on manufacturing and marketing ge...
Read more

The Fragrance

By
A strange feeling swept through him as the car drove past the familiar gates of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. The sun was about to set and the mellow chirping of birds filled the crimson late evening sky. The car drove through the newly laid roads, past the famous landmarks and all-too-familiar turns and finally stopped at the gate of the newly renovated guest house. Aniket stepped out, took off his shades and looked around. A gentle breeze had started to blow. He closed his eyes for a moment and inhaled deeply.  A strange aroma filled his senses, something that he always associated with this place. What was that smell? He couldn’t tell exactly. He took his small trolley bag and rolled it along to the reception.  “Your name, sir?” “Aniket Bhattacharya” “Room S4” It had been ten years since he last came here. Or rather, ten years since he had left this place. He still remembered the day when he finally left the campus. He remembered how a small c...
Read more

Contemplations during 10 days in silence

By
Recently, I finished a 10-day Vipassana course, which is in short, an intense, immersive course in the ancient meditation practice that has supposedly been passed down from the Buddha himself. To appreciate how intense and immersive the 10-day retreat was, let me tell you that it involved giving up all the “distractions” of modern life including cell phones, reading and writing instruments and even all kinds of communication with fellow meditators. It aims to simulate a few days in absolute solitude, practicing meditation and spending all your waking minutes with your own thoughts and consciousness. This mental exploration was quite grueling and extremely difficult at times, but it also came with its share of revelations and realizations and finally, a sense of discovery into an omnipresent yet vast, unexplored realm of one’s own existence, the realm of the mind. One of the remarkable realizations for me was the level of learning I could attain while following a disciplined trai...
Read more

Reincarnation

By
Vishnu woke up, startled! His head was spinning, throbbing with pain. It was one of his dreams again. He sat up at the side of his bed, head down, resting his hands on the edge of the mattress—trying to make sense of it all. Why was he having these premonitions? Or at least, it seemed like premonitions at first. Now, with each passing day, it felt more like something which had happened before—something he’d experienced that had been etched in his consciousness forever. The scary part was that he couldn’t figure out what it was. It was like a distant horizon that kept moving further back as he approached it. Like a never-ending tunnel with light at the end of it—tempting furtively but never giving in to his quests. And yet it was slowly engulfing him like a giant black hole and bits and pieces of his mind were being sucked into its deep abyss. There was something at the end, unmistakably omnipresent—and with every dream it was becoming clearer! There was something deeply intrinsic abo...
Read more

The Homecoming

By
As the sun broke through the night beyond the faraway mountains and its crimson rays kissed the deep verdure of the foothills, Riddhiman felt a new dawn emerging within him. The beaming headlights that were guiding them as they sped through the night were no longer necessary. Like a sole caravan through the desert, the blue Honda City was making its way through a lonely yet enchanting tea estate. In the morning light, the whole landscape looked surreal and mesmerizing to Riddhiman—for a moment he could forget his anxiety and marvel at the beauty that lay around him, lamenting as he had done on many previous occasions, the fact that he didn’t come here at least once every year. Dooars, as the region was often called, indeed opened the doors to his senses. By now they had entered a small village right outside the tea estate. A distinct burning smell greeted them followed by the sight of a few torched shacks and roadside shops. They had seen a few of those during their journey. And a co...
Read more

Reflections on a dew drop

By
It was a reasonably warm winter afternoon in Minneapolis (by its standards) when I left my apartment for the airport to embark on the long journey to India. I stood by the stairs for a moment and reflected upon how the last one and half years had flown by and how I had begun to think of this place on the other side of the world from where I grew up, as a new home. It was also that strange feeling of going from one home to another that took me back in time five years ago. It had been again on a winter afternoon in Kharagpur, albeit without the snow and not nearly as cold, where whilst travelling to the station on my way home to Kolkata I had for the first time experienced that feeling; when I first looked back and thought “I will miss this place”, even though I was only going home. I realize now, that feeling is the making of a new ‘home’, the consummation of a new relationship. Settling down in a new place and calling it your home comes with a lot of emotional upheaval. It’s like...
Read more

Half a dozen strings...

By
Testing times, and it’s been pretty busy; lots of thoughts wandering my mind—disorganized and diverse, fighting for space—I’ll let them make their own music… Yesterday was bhasha dibosh (language day). I couldn’t resist writing the Bangla expression, because the essence of this day is so emphatically linked to this language. It was in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) that a great movement was started in protest of Pakistan’s declaration that Urdu should be the official language of East Pakistan as well. This movement was unique in its objective, no material gains, no bridges to be made, no factories to be shut, no wages to be increased, just the fundamental right to speak the language of your choice, the language of your birth—which is so innately ingrained in each one of us. Bangladesh hosted the opening ceremony of this year’s cricket world cup only a couple of days ago, and in a country that owes its birth to this language, what more fitting way to begin the auspicious occasion ...
Read more

3 Lessons to Lessen the Burden of Misinformation

By
In the past few years, and more acutely in the past few months, the propagation of false information, propaganda and misleading content through the internet has reached unprecedented levels. Certainly, the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing storm of news, information, ideas and conspiracies has brought into focus how difficult it is for a lay person to sift through the cobweb and understand the reality of any sufficiently complex situation. As a scientist, I’m used to looking at new information with skepticism (I invite those of you who think scientists are always in agreement with each other to listen in to our lab meetings or conferences) and I find myself increasingly using a few simple, yet profound concepts, to filter the information stream and help understand the reality. Correlation does not mean Causation : This is the idea that even if two variables appear to go up or down in sync, it doesn’t mean one is caused by the other. Often, there’s a hidden factor that controls them bot...
Read more

Rain Dance

By
It had been raining since late night. Sritoma woke up to the sound of mellow rumbling of clouds and rain drops whispering outside the bed-side window. The incessant rain through the night had metamorphosed the sultry summer night into a cool and pleasant morning. Sritoma, 15, stared outside the window with sleepy eyes soaking in the flavor of the early morning rain. “Toma! Are you up yet?”, Anuradha’s voice from the kitchen brought her back to reality. The morning was supposed to be beautiful, but instead it seemed shrouded in gloom. A lot had been going at home since the last two days. Dadu was ill, very ill, more than he had been all these years—compounded by his whim not to be taken to a hospital and “left to rot”! Finally, they did manage to coax him to a nursing home, but by then he was too weak to protest. And then there was this man….“Come, get your breakfast dear! How much longer would you take to get out of bed?”. Sritoma pulled herself up. It was a virtual holiday. It had...
Read more

The cost of cheaper medicines

By
Healthcare around the world has evolved—revolutionized so to speak. But availability of quality medicine still remains a distant dream for much of the third world. Right to healthcare is regarded as one of fundamental rights in a progressive society. However, the escalating costs of the latest drugs developed by pharmaceutical companies render them out of bounds for the poor. For them, generic drugs are in many cases the only medicines. Generic drugs are non-branded drugs, out of patent protection, which can be manufactured and sold by any company provided they ensure that the efficacy and the administration routine for the drug would not change. Naturally, generic drugs are much cheaper than their branded counterparts. Apparently, it would seem that generic medicines provide the answer to the problem. But sadly, that is not the case. Reality always reserves a little bit of irony for the uninitiated. It is imperative to understand that generic drugs do not appear out of nowh...
Read more