Explorer of Experiences

Clutch. You darn thing. My nemesis. Yes, after having learnt how to ride, I am now learning how to drive. Embarrassed for a long time for not knowing how to move a car and bike, I made up my mind I would just learn and get these two things done with once and for all.  I gave myself a breather of a month post my bike classes to actually pick up the phone and enrol myself into driving school. Maruti Driving School was highly recommended to me and I was quite keen on opting for them having heard highly about their professionalism and their teaching modules. Besides, I did not want to repeat the mistake of joining one of those private training schools who are only interested in your money and care little about whether you actually learn to ride/drive at the end of your sessions.  One of the first things the trainers at the school laid emphasis on is road safety. They have a simulator that you spend xx hours on and they have theory classes and a demo wher...

If you've read my piece called 'Mumbai's Training Glory', you'll better understand where I'm coming from. I wrote this is in August of 2011. My wrath with Mumbai continued, and I wrote on about it but this time I  thought it would be interesting to chronicle my average day for my readers. So go on, read it...your time starts now! That life in Mumbai is a struggle, is probably something you’ve heard way too often. Well it is true, oh so true. But mind you, I’m only part complaining. It’s bad, but you do feel a sense of pride at the end of the day for having lived through it. The city makes you hard. The city makes you strong. The city makes you a survivor. But this is not just another write up of my life in Mumbai. This is the story of my daily travails of getting to work from home and back each day. And I promise, each journey has been nothing short of eventful, to say the least! From my home to the gate is a 7 minute walk. I then cross the road an...

I wrote this post a year into my transition in Mumbai (circa September 2010). My tryst with trains in the city continued till June 2013. I have since left Mumbai and looking back at this post, I pity my past self. Haha! If you have no stories to share from myriad train journeys in Mumbai then, I dare-say, your tryst with this city is incomplete. There is no evading those trains and also no denying their inevitability. Whether running at leopard-speed or crawling at snail-speed on the rat and litter-infested tracks, trains truly are and as popular parlance would have it, the ‘lifelines of Mumbai’. Long distance road travel in this busy and over-populated city is frustrating and utterly time-hogging, leaving the host of commuters with a rather sensible, economical, quick and preferable option of train travel. Sit in a train compartment and you will quickly notice how welcoming this mode of transport is to people across different strata of society. Affluent and chicly...

I'm 26, and I don't know how to ride or drive.  There I've confessed  (now my shoulders feel light) .  What a shame right? For all my life, I've been piggy-backing on someone else to get me from point A to point B. So much dependence. Sheesh Hanisha!  My sister 8 years my junior took to the wheel before me (shame again, I know...I know!). I'm the only one left out of my four siblings who doesn't who the C of a car or a b of a bike. But don't judge me...I've tried learning both, a two and a four wheeler - a two wheeler in college when all I could manage was riding on the straight empty roads, but having my heart in my mouth on the turns; a car when I was in school, where for two days I'd just drive it in the compound round and round in circles, with a nervous-wreck of a driver sitting beside me. But I never saw through either. Both trainings ended abruptly and my heart wasn't in it either.   Recently, when I switched jobs and moved back ...