An allergic reaction
Now Mumbai proper is quite improper and inordinate with regard to distances. The only option that won't burn a hole in your pocket is the train. This being Sunday, the trains were mostly unoccupied and I found myself a nice corner to stand with the wind slapping my face. The fast train stopped at Borivli, which is next to Kandivli, and I took an auto to reach Thakur College, which is bang in the middle of the rather posh Thakur Village. If toff was a place, Thakur Village would be it.
In Mumbai, Kandivli is perhaps the only suburb whose east is sexier than the west. Other than Kandivli, every suburb has a west that is hip and dotted with restaurants, plazas, malls and art galleries, while the east is the poorer cousin, housing worn-down societies and mountains of smelly rubbish.
I was at Thakur College to take four sessions, two each with students of computer science and information technology students (Group 1) and those of electrical and electronics (Group 2). The workshop was organised under the aegis of the recruitment training arm of my company. The training is meant to ready students for the placement season where companies, mostly of a software bent, descend on campuses and recruit students for primarily coding jobs. Yet, when they test students, they expect them to ace subjects as diverse as quantitative ability and verbal aptitude, group discussion and personal interview. This is where we come in.
The sessions did not proceed as planned. Blame my sickness, which is a sorry tale compressed here for your benefit. Everyone, not just me, was sick. There was a virus in the air. Mumbai, at any rate, is not the healthiest city. Two friends of mine who came here from other places are permanently sick. Like, it's a given. My gang doesn't even check with them anymore when we meet out. One is a perpetual vessel of allergies while the other has rediscovered her impertinent sinus in Mumbai.
The virus was so plenipotent it walked right through my bedroom door and grabbed me by my, well, neck, considering my throat was in the throes of a raging infection. Compound that with my chariness in using a mike (it does make me sound like Cher on a particularly bad day). In a hall housing 70 students, I increased the pitch interminably until, two hours later, barely a note escaped my badly strung larynx.
The problem had started a week earlier. I had been dry-coughing all along and going about my days with a litany of "excuse mes" but had refused to start an antibiotic course. This, despite an attractively packaged strip of Moxikind-CV 625 populating my First Aid box.
Let's just call it a burning desire to let my body heal itself, which curiously started with my questioning the weird fashion sense of my students. I refer here to their tresses. Girls' are still okay, but boys? Where do they get those styles from? Who conjures those for them? Their hair rise in the middle of their heads in a symmetrical nod to anti-gravity. For some others, there is a rotund tuft gurgling in the front, paying obeisance to some obscure god of fashion.
Their hands are ringed by black beads that are dying to appear goth but merely look faux-religious. When they enter the classroom they have beads of perspiration lining their foreheads. They smell of energy and look appealingly restless. They fixate me. I am sure it's the age difference but seven years feel like 70 around them.
Since then, in a bid to reset my body clock (non-plainspeak for a way to look younger) I have turned into a self-healer. No medicines, thank you. The Economist did a cover a while ago on the biome that resides within our bodies and which we need to encourage so that that our systems work all right. Bacteria are good, it said. Stay natural, it repeated. I was sold.
If only. Along came the Thakur College session and I realised how ineffective a resolve like that can be when one stays in Mumbai. There is just no scope for any natural healing. Doing away with the mike made it worse. I lunged forth with all the power oxygen and my vocal cords could muster until I sounded as soft as an amnesiac granny.
We had to call the thing off. There was no one to replace me and we had to ask the college to let me come another time. The college rents out its auditorium for shoots (during our session, an episode of one of those assembly-line Balaji shows was being shot), and therefore, has a long calendar of academic and non-academic activities running.
Meanwhile, the papers scream every other day how Mumbai is the most polluted Indian city and that any sane person who has the option to move will do. Time for a job -and city - shift, methinks.
The author has switched too many jobs in the past and hopes he can hold down this one