Rocking in the Free World

At the very outset of this post, I am reminded of some random thing I did in engineering college, in the third and the seventh semester. We had this particular lecturer whose idea of teaching was to walk into class, dictate notes until the end of the hour, take attendance and then leave.

From what our class had heard of him, he was a terror who did not grant gratis attendance, and would remember if you tried to act too funny in his class and then penalize you in the internal evaluations.

That was why I always thought twice about bunking his class, and attended it to take down whatever he dictated and endured it, albeit under extreme duress. It proved to be the ideal way of preparing me for corporate life where I am now able to sit through über-boring, nonsensical meetings while pretending to show interest. In fact, I get paid to do it.

In order to kill one hour, I thought of reading some book in class. But I was a goody-one shoe (half way to being a goody-two-shoes) and did not want to risk getting caught. Nor would I be able to concentrate, given his distracting voice.

Hence, I came up with a brilliant plan to solve this crisis. I decided to take down notes that he dictated in complete earnest.

However, there was a small catch.

I took only four sheets of paper and wrote in as small a font size as was humanely possible, and managed to fill up all the four sheets by the end of the semester. If there was an MS-word equivalent, it would’ve been ‘Hari Shenoy Font, size 1′.

I guess I did the earth a service by saving paper, and this unashamed cheapness on my part is something I am immensely proud of. My marks in those two subjects are a different story altogether.

Speaking of different stories, this one is about travelling cheap, which I decided to do when my mind was wandering and I thought of how I had managed to write so much on so little paper.

I am going to Chennai to cover the Opeth concert for Rock Street Journal, and there is a distinct possibility that I might get to interview Mikael Åkerfeldt and co. This concert will be held at the OAT in IIT Madras as part of the Saarang festival and all that stuff.

I somehow thought it would be cool to spend as little as possible on this trip, from the time I leave Bangalore on the morning of the 25th, till when I return to Bangalore on the 26th in the afternoon. I am planning to spend less than $10 overall, and I hope I can stick to this limit.

As a consequence of that, I have decided to travel in the second class seating section (not that I don’t otherwise, though I’ve been a bit elitist off-late and travelled in a/c on my last four train journeys) and only travel by city buses for intra-city travel.

I am planning to scrounge around for dirt cheap food, while not compromising on hygiene, my appetite or fulfilling my taste-buds’ needs. However, the only possible exception I might make is to head to Benjarong on TTK Road for lunch, should my stomach order me to, in which case a meal for one would cost INR 500. I am hoping that my steely resolve will prevent me from doing so.

In that case, I will have to head to Benjarong in Bangalore to have lunch / dinner to compensate for it, but that will be at a later date.

I also realize that I will have to spend a night in Chennai after the concert, and I’ve concocted all these pseudo-romantic images of sleeping on a park bench within the IIT-M campus, though I realize that I will in all probability end up having extended conversations with some or the other characters present there who, I hope will be as cheap as I am, and not have booked a hotel room.

Even if I end up losing sleep on the night of the 25th, I can make up for it by snoozing on the train on Republic Day, or crashing when I get back home that afternoon.

Right now, I want to know from any good samaritan that will stumble upon this post due to the awesome SEO plugin I’ve installed about the bus numbers that can transport me from Chennai Central to IIT M and back. Also, any info about cheap food places in the vicinity of IIT-M (in a 1 km radius; I plan to walk) would be greatly appreciated.

Opeth ki jai. Motherjane ki jai and of course, Demonic Resurrection ki jai. See you if and when you get there!

PS: Yes, there is an IT slowdown, but this is not a result of that. I’m congenitally cheap.