Mood Indigo

Well well well
never thought i would see myself blogging at all. but now i realise that currently i have nothing else to do in life. thus this blog came to be.

its been almost a month since the visit to mumbai (more specifically IITB campus) for mood indigo.

it was all gonna begin at yeshvanthpur station at 630 am on 20th December 2009.
Mistake 1: left home at 5am guessing it would take an hour to reach yeshvanthpur which is pretty damn far from home..but realised that early morning hours and a really fast driver can more than halve that time when we reached the station at 520 am!!!
so we slowly dragged ourselves to platform 6 and realised we weren't the only dumb ones when more people turned up along with us..
and thus began our tedious 23 hour long journey to the mumbai..

Journey 1 Day 0:
We began our outing from yeshvanthpur at 630, slowly took places and got used to our home for the next 23 hours. then looked at our options to pass the time and decided we shall start with breakfast. Someone amongst us wondered what had happened to the pantry car which had served them hot food in the old times and insisted their dad had told them about the pantry car when they were a small kid :P .
Moving on, we finished breakfast and started with the 'games'. The games that were played included word building (1 hour) , word building with brand names (3½ hours..believe it) and another one which i would prefer not to quote here.
The best brand name being: East India Company courtesy 'P'.
Somewhere during all this, lunch quickly passed by with us being too engrossed in these games.
We spent the night without much to do and called it an early night at 1am, only to be woken up by 3 am to cater to a lost bag. One of our people lost all their belongings on the train and we tried searching for it but in vain.

Mood Indigo Day 1:
Morning dawned and we passed stations like 'sheev' aka 'sion' etc and finally reached dadar..changed platforms 2-3 times and finally landed in a local train that would take us to kanjur marg. Then someone gave us a brilliant idea to jump tracks and reach the road faster and took us through 15 minutes of a 'road' 2 feet wide and finally reached an auto stand where we found an auto that would take us to our destination.
At 730am we reached the campus only to be told that accomodation registration would begin at 830. And so we waited and enjoyed ourselves looking at the graphics in the free newspaper that was given to us.
Finally, at 10am we got to the hostel which was brilliant (they had a canteen and a stationery store that were open till midnight..we cursed our college), but then we learnt that we had only 1/6th of a room for each of us and reserved all the cursing for the moodi people. So we all squeezed in, got ready and began exploring moodi.
We started off on a great note (!!!) standing for an hour in a queue for pronite passes and then we had problems with identifying ourselves (atleast one of us did) and thus began a journey to obtain an identification. We finally obtained a valid one(i better not quote it here :P) and got a pass. On the way, we went to the amazing hostel 13 in a tam tam (IITB bus).
We paid a visit to the humongous IITB lake and enjoyed nature's beauty for a while.
And then we stood in another queue for the concert itself(the queue here was a chimney). We eventually reached the inside of the open air theatre having witnessed half of the night on a screen on the outside. And i couldn't enjoy the concert, all of the day's proceedings and the previous night's lack of sleep gave me a headache.
And the night ended uneventfully.

Mood Indigo Day 2:
The day began early for me: had breakfast at 8am, and went in search of something to watch since watching was all i planned to do for the next 3 days..i guess i did find something to entertain me till 12pm(dont remember what), time for another queue(this one not so long) for passes for the classical night.
Got the passes without much fuss and then watched the nitk team thrash all teams in potpourri with different codes using dota and 'add more letters' :P.
What followed was a hypnosis show and we got an experience of hypnotism can do. What with two of our friends being hypnotised (3 tried), one of them dancing to rang de basanti and the other giving us a bhratanatyam performance. All said, it was a great show, comic hypnotism. By the time that was over it was time for the next queue(a stunningly small queue this one). We enjoyed the classical night and i went to sleep. Overall, it was a pretty boring day 2 for me..

Mood Indigo Day 3:
A normal morning..woke up, had breakfast at a new found canteen in the basement and went for the street dance, enjoyed it for a while and learnt that the queue(yes...another one!!!) was beginning to build up for the next pronite. So, we stood in queue and got passes for the whole college. Spent the afternoon watching a one act play and then roaming the campus.
Then, we stood in queue for the fusion nite, got in fairly early in this one and realised that standing near the speakers was a very bad decision.
However, we thoroughly enjoyed the performance. Next, we tried deciding whether to go for 'tea appreciation' or 'bartendering'. Bartendering won hands down..After bartendering, a band whose name I dont recollect entertained us for the rest of the night, an amazing one i must say. They gave a brilliant performance playing on different kinds of metal including a car!! Then we proceeded to the park to put a part night out and after that took an auto from the park to hostel :P :P, had dinner at 3am (a quite brilliant dinner of aalo paratha dripping with butter and paneer butter masala at canteen 5) and ended our night.

Mood Indigo Day 4:
This day began pretty late...got up at 10, got ready, bunked breakfast and stood at the front of a queue which had reached a length of nearly 500 metres by the time it started moving. I got a pass and gloated about it to all around me. The others were stuck near the end of the queue. The unidentified person amongst us was jugged a pass.
Unfortunately :( although the others eventually got to the front of the queue, they turned out to be the first ones not to get a pass :(
This queue ended at 1230pm, we had lunch, watched a French band performing at LT, and entered the next queue at 2pm.
This day, the 24th of December 2009, we dedicated to Shankar, Ehsaan and Loy
We got pushed around a bit but finally got in quite in time for the concert.
On the way, we sang songs like "hum honge kaamyaab ek din (one day, we shall succeed)" in the queue. We found decent seats at the concert and more than 8-9 people got in to the concert using my pass (guess how!!!). We thoroughly enjoyed the concert and came out at 11pm.
Some of the people who missed the concert visited Uncle Shangos and got stalked by a girl and ended the night.

Mumbai Night 1:
Place: Trains/Nariman Point/Chowpatty
At around 00:00 hours on 25th dec, we reached kanjur marg station and boarded a train to Chatrapathi Shivaji Terminus. Reached there and took a taxi to chowpatty. And thus began our imba night out. We had dinner at 2 pm at sukh sagar (pronounced by some as suck sagar), got kicked off the beach by police officials and started a walk to nariman point(a walk of around 3kms). On the way, we had multiple stops and finally reached our destination at 430 am, slept on the beachside for half an hour and then got on to taxis and began our journey back to hostel.

Mumbai Day 5:
Place: Mumbai (Dadar Station/taxi/home)
We finally reached the hostel at around 7am and just as we decided we'll get some sleep, we were told to clear out our rooms. So we quickly packed up and got ready and when we were about to leave, a bull invaded our room and mutilated chandak's clothing (believe me, we had some crazy experiences there). We somehow cleared the room though we left them a lot of empty bottles as parting gifts by 10am and started out. We took a local train to dadar and tried to find the cloak room to put our luggage. The brainy policeman at the enquiries desk assumed we were terrorists and thoroughly checkd our belongings. And to emphasise on thorough, our messages were checked, our call logs were checked, I was questioned as to why I dont have a memory card on my phone, soundtracks present on one person's phone were played. Whatte day we thought.
But, the day wasnt over as yet. We were denied permission to put our luggage in the cloak room since the bags were not locked. At this point, we were extremely frustrated and decided we shall go home and dump all our luggage, which we finally did. Then, we took a taxi, went on the Bandra-Worli Sea Link and then proceeded to hunt for restaurants. It took us 3 hours to not find even one restaurant that suited everybody's budget and taste. And then, we ended up eating at a highly overpriced restaurant which totally sucked. And thus ended my trip to mumbai. We then met up at the station and got on to our train and began our journey back.

Journey 2 Day 6:
A very uneventful journey. We all spent the journey alone and staring at each other and the walls. The only thing that happened during the journey was that two colleges from pune going to chennai for a convention (a 160 strong contingent) battled it out as to which college was better as we merely watched on.
And on the 26th of December 2009, we arrived back in bangalore and went our own ways.

Overall, it was an absolutely fantastic and very enjoyable week at mumbai.


p.s : my very first blog..so, I would really appreciate any comments/criticism.