The Curious Case of the Gulti Cops at the Jor Bagh Metro Station
Wait.
Who am I kidding? There have been tons of dull moments that have been interspersed with few random occurrences or peaks that have more than amply compensated for the lull.
In between life-changing decisions made, including the need to consume only wine and beer and pulling out warm clothing for the impending North Indian winter that I have been looking forward to eagerly, there’s been a couple of things I’ve wanted to write about.
On 8th October, I had to attend Aisha‘s birthday party at the Indian Habitat Center and I was looking forward to it because the week was particularly hectic and I was hoping this would prove to be a welcome start to the weekend fun times.
The 2010 Commonwealth Games were on in full swing as I took the Delhi metro from Gurgaon to head towards Lodhi Road.
I had to get off the metro at the Jor Bagh station and make my way to the party. The sight that greeted me when I got to the surface from the metro station below was one that surprised me pleasantly. The central part of Delhi was always the most beautiful section of the city for me, with its wide, tarred roads and its lush green cover and palatial compounds. It really made you feel in awe the first few times you went there and took in the feeling that you were right at the heart of the capital.
However, it seemed as though Delhi had surpassed itself in an attempt to project a positive image during the games and the metro station entrances were brightly lit and the roads were well illuminated and despite there being very little traffic, the motorist stopped at the red lights in a display of uncustomary, albeit highly pleasant politeness. The entire area looked beautiful beyond words.
I was already late and reached the metro station at ten at night and was finding it hard to locate an auto-rickshaw. As I sat waiting at the bus stop outside the Jor Bagh metro station, I chanced upon two cops who were sitting there and having a discussion in Telugu.
While I can read the Telugu script because it is similar to the Kannada script, speaking the language was a different ball game altogether. I only know the Telegu phrases for “whats up?” and “I’m broke!” and a few other unparliamentary phrases I’d rather not put up, just in case people from home are reading this.
I went up to them and asked them for where the nearest auto stand was. The cops informed me that one would come along shortly and asked me to wait. As I sat there, I made conversation with them and within thirty seconds, it was evident that they knew little Hindi, no Kannada and lots of Telugu while I knew a little more Hindi, a lot more Kannada and absolutely no Telugu.
One of the cops, on finding out that I was from Mysore had the chutzpah to admonish me and say something to the effect of, “You’re from Mysore and you can’t speak Telugu? WTF!”
I told them that I had spent a year in Hyderabad and both of them mentioned their native town which was on the train route between Bangalore and Hyderabad, a route I had taken enough number of times to know of a few stations that were on the way. It was quite delightful to see their faces light up in recognition as I said ‘Guntur’, ‘Hindupur’, ‘Dharmavaram’ and ‘Anantpur’ and so on. This act seemed to bring me into their good books and they decided to take it upon themselves to hail me an auto-rickshaw.
One of the cops walked towards the road, brandishing his ancient gun on his shoulder and stopped auto-rickshaws that were passing by on the road. It was quite funny, considering how he wasn’t particularly bothered about whether the auto was already occupied or not. Some of the cleverer ones veered towards the right side of the road and sped away, while the rest of them that were stopped made an excuse and scooted off anyway.
My repeated attempts to thank him and ask him not to stop any occupied auto-rickshaws were met with a stern dismissal as he motioned for me to sit and wait at the bus-stop, while he continued stopping one hapless rickshaw driver after another.
Finally, some auto driver with no passenger showed up and amidst as much ceremony as could be mustered, the cop patted me on the back and away I went, grateful and quite pleasantly amused at the same time.
I wonder whether they’d have personally escorted me to the Habitat Center had I spoken Telugu. I’ll never know.
Don’t Run Over a Donkey!
Everything is in the moment and that, on some level keeps you guarded in some ways and also gives you ample opportunity to be more open. I’ve had highly entertaining conversations with cab drivers in this regard and one particular instance of a discussion that I had yesterday is what has prompted me to write this post.
I was on a cab from Gurgaon to Delhi and after extensive conversation on random topics including the Ayodhya verdict and a couple of disciplinary complaints filed against the cab driver, he told me of a test he had to take every three years, as mandated by the cab company that he was working for.
The test required him to be strongly aware of laws, rules and regulations to ensure that he’d never botch up while going about his work on a daily basis. The following bits of conversation actually transpired and are as authentic as the name of the company I work for. Neither of them has been made up, I promise.
The cab driver asks me a question which was on the test. “If you were driving on the road and there was a human and a donkey straight ahead, and you had no option but to hit one of them because you couldn’t stop on time, who would you rather plow your vehicle into?”
I thought for a couple of seconds, considered the whole utilitarian aspect of things, weighed in my mind the fact that a human life might, to the law makers at least, seem more precious than that of a donkey’s and said to him that I’d run into the donkey to save the human being instead.
“Wrong answer!”, he said, quite vehemently, while half turning around to possibly reinforce the strength of his conviction.
“If you run over a human being accidentally, you’ll spend at most two years in jail, but if you run over a donkey, you get seven years straight, no questions asked!”, he said. “So, if you want to save five years, close your eyes and run over the human. Its sad but true that a donkey’s life is worth more than that of a human being’s.”
Before I could ask him for more information, my destination had arrived and I had to leave. But what he said seems too incredulous to be true.
If there is some legislature to corroborate this claim, it would be immensely WTF. If it is something the guy made up, he did give me enough to mull over and laugh about at the same time.
Life on a Metro, Option 44 and Other Nonsense
The Haryana Quizzers Forum (Such a thing does exist. I am not making this up, I swear.) has cleverly named itself Option 44 in case the 43 malls in this place are not worth visiting every other Sunday. The quizzes are held in the MDI, Gurgaon campus and I had been to a quiz on Sunday the 19th.
It was good to quiz and to be on the campus of an educational institute, with lush green lawns and trees all over the place, in strong contrast to the quasi-desert like foliage in most of Gurgaon. Their canteen was cozy and had cheap, albeit reasonably tasty food and there was strong reaffirmation in my own head of the need to be in an academic-style environment in the days ahead.
If you’re in Gurgaon and you enjoy quizzing show up! Link is here.
But with the yellow metro line, things seem to have changed for the better. Supposedly, traffic jams aren’t half as bad along the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road as they were before. I remember taking the bus to south Delhi to reach the Rock Street Journal office in May this year and it took me almost ninety minutes to go the distance.
Now, I need only a 25 minute metro ride and a short walk to take me to my destination in Shahpurjat. The metro rail corporation has also increased the frequency of trains with the opening of the full line.
As the old saying goes, with great frequency come great crowds, and all the rides I’ve taken, whether towards Delhi or intra-Gurgaon have all been reasonably crowded, showing decent utilization rates at most times.
Just the other day, my friend, his wife and the third wheel, yours truly took the metro from Gurgaon all the way to Connaught place, walked around aimlessly, had dinner, and got back in good time. The convenience that it offers is, as of now, unparalleled.
It feels good, as a fan of mass transit to take the metro, since it is clean and efficient to a point where one sometimes ends up feeling good about how at least some of the stuff in our country is of international standards. The nauseating stench of body odour that, on rare occasions hits you when you enter a particularly crowded compartment, however, reminds you that you’re still very much in Swades.
Cooking does seem like an interesting hobby to take up and while the regular cookery shows on TV seem to be as tailor made for men as the serials about household strife between mothers-in-law and their daughters-in-law, Masterchef Australia, airing on Star World seemed to be good fun to watch.
So much so that there has been one occasion mid-week when I passed up on meeting with a bunch of friends to watch what happens on the show, when one of the contestants was head-to-head against a celebrity chef.
There’s some valuable tips on cooking (although most of their preparations are not vegetarian) with some interesting cuisine being showcased. The mix of ingredients in defined quantities and the approach towards food preparation seems to make implicit, intuitive sense which is another strong reason why it is quite appealing to view.
Ironic, since until recently when I looked up Wikipedia for Australian cuisine and when a friend who visited Oz told me so, I hadn’t even the faintest idea that Australian cuisine was so diverse, rich and experimental in nature.
While channel surfing randomly, I came across some shady, stupid and highly entertaining show named ‘Male Fantasy’ on MTV and I was reminded of MTV Roadies, Splitsvilla and other cheesy shows that aired until recently and was then reminded of how I was almost a regular viewer back in the day. The shows did make you feel much better about your own self than you deserved to.
With selective news feeds on my google reader and with my twitter account letting me follow only a select bunch of people that would post relevant links, the ability to customize what cyberspace offers and take only what is necessary has led to an increased optimization of time spent online, while simultaneously shutting out a whole world of (possibly unnecessary) news and information that is bourgeois at best.
Heck, selectivity has been the rule of thumb so strongly that I’ve blocked / hidden the facebook feeds of those people on my friends list that have had the dubious distinction of sharing what I feel are crappy links on the news feed. You just might know who you are. Screw you. Ha!
When I was here for two days last December, the weather seemed really decent and appealing and one can hardly wait for the onset of winter.
Right now, as I type this, it is raining outside like cats and dogs, which probably means that there will be the usual amount of slush and garbage on whatever is left of Gurgaon’s roads tomorrow.
But admittedly, when the temperatures are bearable, Gurgaon isn’t a bad place and it does tend to grow on you with time. In summer next year, I will have reversed my opinion once again, but for now, let status quo remain.
Delhi to Dharamshala: The Dharamshala Diary
Plus, more often than not, I engage in solo travel and the onus for comfort or the lack thereof is solely my prerogative.
However, this time I was with a friend who had booked us at the HPTDC (Himachal Pradesh Tourism Department Corporation) hotel in McLeodGanj and this nice, clean hotel (Hotel Bhagsu) with rooms cleaned daily added in its own way to the travel experience.
The advantage of traveling with Mohit the Just was that I had already told him about the fact that I can be quite anti-social at times. This meant that he completely understood my need for alone-time and he was happy and content doing his own thing as well.
We spent most of our day in McLeodGanj in our own way, meeting occasionally for a meal or for consuming copious quantities of Contessa and Old Monk rum back in the hotel room late in the evening.
Dogs are supposed to be reincarnated monks who had previously left the fold but have now seen the light and wish to atone for their act of desertion and are thus seen around temples and monasteries. With this belief, all the stray dogs as well as the pet ones are all taken care of very well and fed to their heart’s content.
It didn’t seem as if any of them was ill-treated, unlike dogs in most other places in the country.That was strongly evinced by how healthy, happy and friendly most of them seemed to be.
It was a nice hardbound book that I had picked up for a low price at the second hand book sale in Daryaganj in Old Delhi. The book had a flap jacket with a picture of His Holiness on it, which was conveniently removed and left at the hotel room, with only the black hard cover visible as I carried the book around in my backpack during my walks around the place.
On such occasions, when the need for alone time, for reflection and for when thoughts meandering like a restless wind inside a letter box take precedence over all else, a book serves as a handy companion, and random conversations with strangers comes a distant second to alleviate any uncharacteristic craving for company.
The removal of the flap-jacket was to avoid the seemingly obvious fan-boyishness that was quite evident among a few other tourists.
I have forever maintained that it is always interesting to observe people that wear their piety on their sleeve, albeit from a reasonably safe distance.
However, the number of shops that sold handicrafts, religious items and other relevant material associated both with Buddhism and with the Tibetan cause made one wonder whether these keepsakes had anything to do with the cause or were being used merely to satiate the average tourist’s needs to place in his / her room a souvenir suggesting that they had been to Dharamshala and returned with a small part of it.
Sort of like the souvenir equivalent of a Patel-shot.
However, every once in a while, the peace is disturbed by a CH, HR or PJ registered vehicle blaring music loudly as it honks its way through the narrow roads to create a path for itself.
One of the few times in my life that I’ve ever managed to smile and cringe at the same time is when such a vehicle passed by, splashing water on pedestrians, with Imran Khan’s ‘Amplifier’ playing loudly enough to drown everything else out for those few seconds that one was in close proximity to the vehicle.
My encounter with Japanese cuisine was particularly memorable and the meal I had comprised of ‘Kakiage Don‘, a dish that contained assorted batter fried vegetables and egg topped over soy flavoured sticky rice with wasabi sauce on the side. Normally, this dish contains prawn, but egg was a decent substitute nonetheless.
The competitions my sister and I had when we were in school, of eating rice and dal with chopsticks came in handy whilst I devoured this absolutely tasty meal.
Added to all this were the various breakfast combinations and options, as well as a bunch of desserts on each day, which made for a delightful gastronomic experience.
The plethora of great food options is among the few upsides of visiting a rather popular tourist destination.
Delhi to Dharamshala: The Ludhiana / Jalandhar Detour
The past weekend had thursday off at the office in lieu of Janmashtami and that provided ample scope to take time off on Friday to make it a four day weekend. Dharamshala was decided upon as the destination of choice and the fact that the rainy season was on meant that the place wouldn’t yet be inundated with peak Amit capacity.
Now, the preferred mode of travel is flight, but only Kingfisher flies to the airport near Dharamshala and round trip tickets are frigging expensive. Consequently, train travel was the obvious preferred choice.
I’d booked A/c 3-tier tickets about a month in advance and even though I was waitlisted, it seemed as though enough people would drop out for me to get confirmed tickets by the time the date of journey arrived.
I was travelling with Mohit the Just and he suggested, quite sensibly, that we need a backup plan. He therefore booked confirmed second class sleeper tickets, as an insurance policy.
We decided to rendezvous at the Old Delhi railway station at around 8 on the evening of September 1st, to be in time for the departure of the train with the confirmed ticket, henceforth colloquially referred to as the Jammu Mail. Due to horrendous traffic jams in the Old Delhi area near the Red Fort leading up to Chandni Chowk, I was delayed and reached the station fifteen minutes after the scheduled departure of the train, only to find that the train hadn’t yet left.
Mohit and I checked out the assigned compartment and found out to our dismay that a gigantic LG television box lay on the precise location of our seats.
Standing outside the compartment and seeing it overflowing with people, with the sweltering air adding to my discomfort, the elitist bastard in me chose to pass up on this train with the fervent hope that the air conditioned one on which we were waitlisted would provide us passage.
However, it was not to be since the waitlist hadn’t moved up and we were left stranded at the railway station platform, knowing fully well the age old saying about the bird in hand, but choosing to be stubborn and perhaps, a bit asinine in ignoring it all the same.
What happened next was that we ended up heading to the Kashmere Gate Inter-State Bus Terminus and boarding a shady private bus that took us to Jalandhar via Ludhiana. The travel on this bus makes for an interesting tale in itself, although I’d rather you experience it for yourself should you get a chance.
Needless to say, the stupid bus driver took his own sweet time transporting us along the plains on what is possibly one of India’s best laid out roads, NH1, making us believe that we’d have done the distance much faster on a TVS 50CC.
When we woke up, we’d reached Ludhiana from where we had to change over and take another bus to Jalandhar from where we had to change over and take another bus to Dharamshala.
Discounting my visit to Chandigarh as a kid with family, this was my first proper visit into Punjab and looking all around the countryside, the place seemed radically different from any other place I have been to in the country.
Lush green fields on either side of the roads for long stretches, marred by the occasional Skoda, Jaguar, Merdeces Benz showroom bang in the middle of nowhere, combined with huge sprawling mansions in the center of massive fields gave one the impression that these guys liked to live it big and that the Pubjabi penchant for opulence as seen on TV is not the urban legend one would have naively made it out to be.
You didn’t really see too many poor (rather poor-looking) people since everyone seemed to be dressed up in trendy clothes and seemed quite jolly. The music being played loudly on the bus also added to this impression and comprised of the typical Punjabi night club music which, funnily enough, didn’t sound out of place as our bus sped along on the road to Jalandhar.
I must confess that this place piqued my interest enough to warrant a visit sometime in the future during the onset of winter. A trip to Amritsar and to the Wagah border is definitely on the cards in the days ahead.
We managed to catch a glimpse of the much-advertised and spoken about Lovely Professional University and witnessed first hand a few hundred of the twenty three thousand students make their way into the vast campus, on the outskirts of Jalandhar.
After a brief stopover when we were lying in wait for the next bus to take us to Dharamshala, we finally clambered onto a bus that took its own sweet time along the winding roads up the hills, passing through places such as Hoshiarpur and Dehra and making no less than four stops before finally dropping us off at Dharamshala.
The air in the mountains lets you relax and chill out to a point where you are not bothered by how the driver seemed to be taking his own sweet time to transport you to your final destination. Cliched as it sounds, the journey by itself was a fun experience as the landscape changed from the hot plains to the cooler mountains until such time that when we finally arrived, the entire place had grown misty and obscured the magnificent conifers and the hilly landscape from our view.
I can always say in retrospect that the longer, significantly more uncomfortable journey was fun because I had no choice but to endure it. However, that sudden feeling of wanting to say goodbye to the train as it left the platform to take alternate transport into the hills instead gave me a chance to see parts of the country that I would’ve otherwise had limited incentive to visit, and for that I am grateful.
More about the actual Dharamshala trip in the next post.
The Peepli (Live) experience, Live!
I’m sure you’ve read reviews or heard enough about Peepli (Live) to read any additional drivel that I spew about the movie. What I’m instead going to testify to is the Gurgaon experience of watching Peepli, and how (as Pavitra Jayaraman mentioned) one “should be paying extra for that experience”, in the light of what transpired.
The movie came highly recommended by Arjun Gera, who insisted that Peepli was quite like Gurgaon and that people living here ought to watch it just for that if not anything else.
I celebrated four months of living in Gurgaon by watching it last evening.
My friends and I left the office and managed to reach the theater and make it just in time to watch the trailers before the start of the movie. The cinema hall was only about 20% full and we settled into our seats.
Soon after the Shah Rukh Khan Airtel ad imploring everyone to keep their mobiles on silent was aired, the familiar Francisco Tárrega piece began playing from somewhere in row behind us and the guy who answered the phone ended up speaking about many things including his inability to have a long conversation because he was at a movie. We could also hear the guy at the other end of the conversation, as could everyone else in the theater.
He was shushed half-heartedly by a bunch of people in the corner who proceeded to make a lot of noise themselves as the movie progressed, but after he hung up the phone, the entire group that he was part of engaged in a loud conversation in Haryanvi for quite a while.
Normally, I’d be among the last people to mask my indignation at such behaviour, but all my friends had warned me that I was better off not being in any potentially confrontational situation, since I didn’t have a gun and most of those that wanted to pick fights had one by default. Plus I’m not known at all for my fighting skills.
Once we knew there was nothing one could do about it, the whole drama that was unfurling in the row behind us added to the movie watching experience. These guys proved to be the best laugh-track for the movie and made for an overall fun experience. Mostly because it seemed like these backbenchers were from Peepli as well, I guess.
Watch the movie with gujjar and jat “bois” (as their bumper stickers so proudly proclaim) and you’ll know what I mean.
Try as I might, I wasn’t able to string together something to connect a Greek orthodox church saint who survived being trampled upon by mules, Italian blue cheese and the protagonists of the movie ‘Small Soldiers’ with where I live and work now. In due time, I guess.
But if you, Dear Reader, can put something together, feel free! My best wishes.
Conspicuous Consumption Goodbye
Not anymore.
Having gotten around Gurgaon and Delhi has given me a sense of how strong the concept of conspicuous consumption is among the residents of this part of the country. Its not just the noveau riche that are guilty of ostentatious behaviour, it is also those that have been rolling in wealth for many years that seem to want to pwn the new kids on the block.
Neither party is to blame, for a show of wealth is in general considered a positive trait in most circles and with each new batch of billionaires (Rupee, not Zimbabwean Dollar) adding to this spiral, the number of grand weddings, ceremonies and flashy automobiles purchased is only going to increase with time.
In the midst of all this, how would a minimalist with a mere bicycle (albeit a good 21 speed bike) and a strong disinclination to own personal transport or have fixed assets tying him down cope? Not too great, but not too badly either, I admit.
An interesting article by Stephanie Rosenbloom in the New York Times speaks of how a couple began to divest themselves of all possessions until such time that they had few assets with them, leading to an overall increase in happiness.
Money is definitely the means to an end, but it seems as though there’s an increasing trend among people to spend money on experiences rather than on anything tangible.
Taking vacations, spending on important people rather than on important things, indulging oneself in a good meal or a short, spontaneous trip seem to make more sense and provide pleasure in greater magnitudes than mere purchases, for the value of the latter decreases with time while the former still stays fresh in one’s mind.
What is somewhat eerie is that I personally feel that I am already in that zone of shunning heavy purchases and instead opting for experiences. As times change, this sort of behaviour is widely being acknowledged as the ‘new’ normal.
Maybe there is more sense in chasing windmills than in chasing money.
Weekends in the NCR
In Bangalore, my weekend planning was initially governed by when I would leave the city to head to Mysore. When things settled in and I began discovering, exploring and understanding Bangalore, and eventually falling in love with the place (for the most part), my plans revolved around spending time in the pursuit of various things within the city, as I slowly trudged up the Maslovian pyramid.
That glorious run of nearly five years came to an end in 2009 when I had to move to Hyderabad to study and weekends there were mostly spent working on assignments or studying or doing something or the other that entailed being on campus for the most part, as a result of which, there was no real need to make any weekend plans or follow through on them had they been made in the first place.
Cut to the NCR where I have been at for the past three months now, and I find myself in completely different circumstances. I don’t have the comfortable proximity to Mysore that I had previously found myself in when I was in Bangalore. Nor do I have enough work yet (if work at the office is discounted from the equation) like I did either in Bangalore or Hyderabad to keep me completely preoccupied.
In such situations, weekend planning becomes vital to one’s attempts at keeping the ennui monster at bay. When travel to places outside of the NCR isn’t conducive due to constraints that narrow down to lack of time or money or enthusiasm or a mix of two or more of the these factors, checking out the sights, sounds and tastes that Delhi has to offer then becomes part of the weekend menu.
As part of my sojourns, here’s snippets of experiences I’ve had that I find worth documenting.
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I’d had a tiring week, I hadn’t had enough sleep either and this delay only compounded my misery. Since I had to board my train from Delhi junction (the old Delhi railway station) which is served by the Chandni Chowk Metro station, I figured I might as well see why this place deserved as much fame as it had.
The exit from the metro station led onto a temple and a huge Gurudwara right opposite it. It was late in the evening and most of the shops were closed. Traffic volumes weren’t as high as they’d have been during the day, but there was a lot of hustle and bustle still around. I walked westward and could see lines of shops on both sides and it seemed quite like most crowded main streets in most towns or cities that I’d visited.
What was different, however, was the sight of the iconic Red Fort looming large on the horizon. I am not quite sure how long the walk was, since I was numb from having walked so much already. But the heat and dust notwithstanding, with tracks from Incubus’ ‘Morning View’ playing in my ears, the sight of the Red Fort in Old Delhi was majestic and the way it awes you when you see it first is probably a good reason to visit it both during the day as well as after sun-down.
I am however still to figure out what the big deal about Chandni Chowk is. Only time will tell.
I’m going to be there at the Red Fort on Independence Day to see our Prime Minister give his speech live and that, I think, is quite a big deal.
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On this route, I’ve seen the remains of Tughlaqabad and even the sight of the Qutub Minar is now something that I’m used to. But whenever I get a chance to go to any monument or building that looks like it is older than a hundred years, I make it a point to step inside and take a look. I like them much better than the glass high-rises that dot the landscape, air con being the only redeeming quality about most of these buildings.
At the start of Lodhi Road lies Safdarjung’s Tomb. The tomb is a majestic building with water fountains on all four sides, making the aerial view of the place look like a plus sign with the tomb in the center. One can clearly tell that Safdarjung wasn’t probably as historically important as the Mughal rulers (SJ was in Ahmed Shah Bahadur’s court), since my friend and I were the only two people that were at that place at half-past five on a Saturday evening.
There was a solitary guard and pretty much nobody else with administrative capacity in that huge plot of land dotted by numerous trees including the coconut palm, the sight of which, I confess, was a refreshing change from the traffic outside.
My landlady, who seems to be a bibliophile, judging by the huge number of books lying around in her house, has been nice enough to give me two books on the history of Delhi, and combined with ‘City of Djinns’ by W. Dalrymple and some other literature that I plan to read, should give me enough information about these buildings and more when I begun a self-initiated tour to check out all the seven cities that make up our capital. Of course, this requires a strong dip in temperatures to set the ball rolling.
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Gurgaon’s score on this is quite low, but the saving grace for now is the presence of the metro line that serves some parts of the city.
However, travel around Delhi is so convenient thanks to the presence of the Metro. In fact, the first time I used it was when I was traveling from the Indraprastha station to Rajiv Chowk in early June this year.
I wasn’t aware of the smart card / token systems that one needs to know about while traveling on these trains. The important difference between other regular modes and this one is that your token / smart card needs to be checked in at the turnstiles twice, once while entering the station and once, while getting off at your destination.
My first journey had me face quite a few d-uh moments; including being unaware of where to place the token at the turnstile and such, but casual observation of how other passengers behave is more than enough to understand how to go about using this service.
One of these d-uh moments was when it temporarily slipped my mind that Connaught Place was now officially named Rajiv Chowk. It was only thanks to a funny dinner-time conversation I’d had at home with the family that I remembered in time and was thus able to choose the right station while buying the token.
Since that day, I’ve got me a smart card and my frequency of visits to the capital has gone up. Most commuters, yours truly included, are waiting for the time when the metro line will open up fully until Rajiv Chowk. So far, trains travel only until the Qutab Minar metro station from Gurgaon.
The fact that the Metro is brilliantly air conditioned only adds to the charm of traveling on it in the cruel, cruel summer. But its presence has so far prompted me to not buy a car and instead divert all those funds into travel.
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