The vagabond in me.... (Part 3 – The Trivandrum leg)

As the first rays of morning sun found its way thru the small opening in the closed curtains, and kissed my face ever so gently, I slowly opened my eyes ready to face a new day in a new place. I would’ve loved to wake up like that... Instead I woke up hearing somebody shouting “Trivandrum, Trivandrum...Sir, pls wake up its Trivandrum”. I jumped up hurriedly, put the lappy bag on my back, hung the main bag on the right shoulder, held the pullover in the left hand (strategically so that the IIMK tag was visible to all) and the water bottle in the right hand and alighted the already moving bus, remembering the great scientist Bernoulli when I jumped on to the ground.

After walking aimlessly for a while, sipping a coffee I bought from a nearby chai shop (In case u were wondering, I had put the water bottle in the bag so that I had one limb free), I found a nondescript hotel n decided to set my base there. When I paid the receptionist the advance, the fundas of marketing n branding which I soaked in during the 1st year danced before my eyes...(Just three months back I had booked a room in Goa for 5 days, for that amount of dough I could’ve stayed in this hotel for more than a month !!! ) .

I put on the formals (Remember, I had meetings with several media guys, though the vagabond wasn’t much interested in that) and hit the road. So there we were, a highly polished, fully dressed up MBA grad and a free spirited, I-don’t-care-a-shit vagabond, looking for a restaurant to fill the stomach. The conical shaped ghee-roast I ate n the Tanjore filter coffee I drank from restaurant Arya Nivas reminded me of the wonderfully authentic South-Indian breakfasts I used to savour at Murugans Idli shop n Saravana Bhavan in Chennai..(Chennai foodathons will be covered some other time ). The bus that was parked across the hotel attracted my attention. I had seen buses lying by the roadside, but this one looked as if it hadn’t moved an inch from that place for centuries. I wondered if the bushes u see in the picture actually grew from the ground or the tyres. The vagabond wanted to live inside the static caravan, like in the movie ‘Into the wild’, but I resisted.

Once again the Promotion P of marketing was glaringly visible in front of my eyes. Time wasn’t standing still for me to check out if this kinda promotion had any impact on the people. I had to make a move. Next couple of hours were spent teaing n snacking (read it like ‘wining n dining’!!!) in the homes of contacts from various media houses. The tagline of a restaurant named Azad hypnotised me to have lunch from there. It read something like “The restaurant which brought Biriyani to the Keralites 60 years ago”. I was pleasantly surprised to see the number of mush-blush-hush couples inside the restaurant. This was somewhat different from the Trivandrum I saw when we went there during college – a one day trip we remember as ‘Ambrosia trip’.

After hobnobbing with some more media guys for a couple of hours, I set aside two hours exclusively for the vagabond. We wandered aimlessly; picking up various DVDs, drinking ( some flavoured local drink) and eating from the road side “thattukadas” , watching the crowd n clicking snaps. In the evening I boarded the train to Cochin thinking how different the next 24 hours were going to be compared to the previous...

To be contd...