Sunday, January 31, 2010

Nagpur rising


For the people who do not know me but read my blog, I was born in Nagpur and lived there for the first 17 years of my life. So, my love for Nagpur is undying. Many acquaintances of mine still remember my famous quote when I was 5-8 -"I will bring Olympics to Nagpur". At late twenties, I have given up hopes on that as well as the Nobel Peace prize, but I still have hopes for a Padmashri (well that doesn't need hope as much as money these days)

Nagpur is a very strange city. In any kind of stats across India, Nagpur comes in top 10 (In population etc). However, thanks to Nagpur's excellent infrastructure, at any traffic light, even at peak hours you won't see more than 30 vehicles out of which 28 are two wheelers. Nagpur is never in regular news. You would probably even hear more about Allahabad than Nagpur though Nagpur features in all those top 10 lists and Allahabad not even in top 20. Nagpur is 9th or 10th in those lists followed by Jaipur, but just see the % of headlines that Jaipur has as compared to Nagpur. For years Nagpur people have talked about state of art industrial area called Buti Bori which till date hasn't come up with anything more than Vicco Vajradanti and the MIHAN project which is still going on.

To summarize the two paragraphs above, I love Nagpur but Nagpur is never in news. We crave for any kind of Nagpur news. I remember during my undergrad, when Dravid got married to a Nagpuri girl, we Nagpuris prided ourselves for a long time. Those pictures of Vijeeta getting up into Rajdhani Bangalore with her shades on is fresh in my memory.

Anyways, Nagpur is back again in news. The importance of these, I solely reserve for your discretion.

* Cricket Nagpur: VCA is now a day night stadium. It hold very important records for for team India including Sachin and the retirement venue of Saurav Ganguly.

* The director of the top grossing Hindi movie of all times,Raju Hirani 3 Idiots, guess were he hails from? --- Nagpur

* The national president of the opposition party, Nitin Gadkari is from Nagpur.

Over the past 2 months, whenever these news came, I always swelled with pride. Jai Bharat, Jai Nagpur, Kha Santra.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

School bag memories

I just came back from work, dropped a bag on the couch and jumped off into the bed with the laptop. I open ToI and this is what I see: Kendriya Vidyalayas set weight limits on schoolbags. It says:


As per the new `loadshedding' policy laid down for the 981 Kendriya Vidyalayas across India, schoolbags for classes I and II should not weigh more than 2kg. For classes III and IV, the bag weight should be less than 3kg, and those studying in classes V to VIII shouldn't carry bags that are more than 4kg. The upper limit for senior classes — IX to XII — has been set at 6kg.

Immediately, all bag related thoughts came by. It is strange that my bags have just been in reverse order.

The bag I dropped just now at the couch has a checkbook, a muffler, a pair of gloves, ear phones and my lunch box.

Back in grad school, my bag had 1 binder notebook and a Laptop.

In undergrad, it was funnier. For the class, I went with 3-4 notebooks in hand but when I went for "studying" in the library at night, it was usually 3-4 notebooks, one big fat electrical book and a bunch of pens. Oh yes, it also had the GRE prep book and a bunch of flash cards all the time. Note that I gave GRE only after I graduated.

11th and 12th was fun. I would carry not the text books but the reference books to school, atleast 5 of them everyday along with the corresponding notebooks. And ofcourse, the big lunch box, to be emptied long before lunch time.

6th to 10th was pretty lame with textbooks and notebooks brought according to the day's time-table. An additional trividha, rapid reader always accompanied. This was the time when horizontal dimension of the bag was less than the vertical dimension. Before this, it was all reverse.

Pre 6th standard, with the H>V dimension bags, I could make two compartments in the bag. One was for notebooks, one was for textbooks. Also, no textbook was to be missed. The drawing book has to be there and then the sketchpen set. The compass box which was never used and the box of crayons. I would cram in everything I own in that bag. No wonder, the bags weer torn every year and that too the base fell off.

I don't know how much the bag weighed then, but it was a fashion to have heavy bags. May be that's what retarded my height. If I were to be a student of this time, may be I would have been 6'2''.....

Image Courtesy: MYSORE TARPAULINS