George FilesThe truth, one post at a time

Getting back home - Raja Hamsa

November 24, 2007 by roshan.george in Madras, Travel, Bangalore, India

Kempegowda Bus Terminus - A blurry photo Being incredibly lazy, P, S and I didn't book our train tickets back home. So, Thursday night we found ourselves at Kempegowda Bus Terminus with a confirmed ticket for an 'Executive Class' bus arriving at 10:21. We got to the terminus by travelling by auto, and man the place is wild. It's like a giant bus dumpyard or something, they're just everywhere and in every direction and in lots of colours and with route plates in all sorts of languages.

We managed to get to the appropriate platform much ahead of time and spent our time looking at the Volvo buses and wondering if they were worth the extra 150 bucks. They look pretty damn awesome. So how this Bus Terminus works is, each bus arrives and the conductor dude starts yelling the time that the bus was meant to arrive at and that's how people know which bus is which. They'll wait lots of time and call out for passengers that haven't yet arrived. So while we waited, we saw 10:10, 10:15 go by and alarmingly, 10:30, 10:35 and 10:50. Naturally, every bus but ours had arrived on time and left. I blame Pipe. You can always blame Pipe. It's usually his fault and he's very blameable. Actually, in this case, he was the one who went and got the tickets so I get to blame him however much I like.

The seats - thumbnail At around 11 our bus arrived and we boarded it and promptly made our seats lean back the most we could, reclining peaceably and drinking apple juice. The bus left half empty and so we asked the conductor if any more people would be coming, and after he said that 12 more would be waiting at another stop we grabbed the last row of seats. The good thing about this last row is that the seats are contiguous and so you can use them as a bed... or so we thought. Anyway, the thing is these buses have a button that you press to recline. The problem is that this button is placed between seats, so it's rather uncomfortable unless you manage to miss those buttons. Just takes a little practice. I managed to sleep at 1:30 that night, not strange considering I had one of those reasonably decent espressos at Café Coffee Day. We reached CMBT at around 6 in the morning. Not bad, pretty quick. Enough time for me to get home, unpack, get ready for college and fall asleep instead. Pipe managed to get to college though. Typical. Though he did collapse that evening. That'll teach the fellow. Simbly roaming here and there.

Some other pictures:

Sitting at the window - Master of the Blurry photo
Guy carring weapons at Kempegowda
Pipe reading Catcher in the Rye

22 comments

MarcNovember 24, 2007

Yes yes but what is Raja Hamsa?

Typical Pipe, accepting blame for everything and going to college too.

roshan.georgeNovember 24, 2007

Raja Hamsa was the name of the whatever that the bus belonged to.

Pipe is nuts.

sindhuNovember 24, 2007

raja hamsa translates to the swan of a king :) beautiful isnt it? thats basically a sanskrit usage ... lufthansa raja hamsa ring bells?

roshan.georgeNovember 24, 2007

Oh, fascinating. I figured it had something to do with a swan because one of the buses had one painted across the side.

Lufthansa has nothing to do with swans, as far as I know, though. It's some merchant group.

sindhuNovember 24, 2007

ha yeah? luft means air, hansa means swan... its in german. hansa is a sanskrit word too.

roshan.georgeNovember 24, 2007

I'm pretty sure Schwan means Swan. I remember my German prof telling us particularly that it wasn't named for the swan.

MarcNovember 24, 2007

Sindhu, Wikipedia says "The name of the company is derived from Luft (the German word for "air"), and Hansa (after Hanseatic League, the powerful medieval trading group)."

MarcNovember 24, 2007

German is much closer to European languages and very very very far away from Sanskrit.

roshan.georgeNovember 24, 2007

Ah Wikipedia, authority on knowledge, arbiter of disputes...I thank thee, Marc, for invoking her.

sindhuNovember 25, 2007

wrong, german is the closest language ,my teacher told me so.

http://www.lankalibrary.com/books/sinhala5.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Language/2007_March_14

roshan.georgeNovember 25, 2007

Someone else was also telling me about something relating Germany and India (some Vedas business or something). This is interesting. I haven't done Sanskrit, and my German is abysmal, so I have no clue myself.

MarcNovember 25, 2007

Sindhu, the first link hardly mentions it. And the second link says 'Sinhala is distantly related to other major languages such as German'. Hardly the closest language. Why would you expect your teacher not to claim incredible things about his/her profession?

roshan.georgeNovember 25, 2007

Well, um, why would a prof claim that German is related to Sanskrit unless they were sure or were misled? I mean, I don't see why he'd make random observations like that.

The wikipedia link doesn't mention Sanskrit's relation to German at all, unfortunately.

IshaNovember 25, 2007

For an explanation what Lufthansa means you could have simply (simbly) asked me xD Even I could have told you that!

And somebody told me once that Latin & Sanskrit are somewhat related, hence, German would be related to Sanskrit as well... Latin and German are pretty similar.

roshan.georgeNovember 25, 2007

Yes, but that's the simple way Isha. We don't do that. Latin and German are similar? I didn't know that.

IshaNovember 26, 2007

Of course it's similar. That's why it was compulsory for German teachers to know Latin until a few years ago. I think.

Oh yes. The simple way. Way too easy for such ingenious people like you :)

roshan.georgeNovember 26, 2007

If one always chooses the path of least resistance, one will become soft and smushy, like mashed pineapples.

HeavyGodNovember 27, 2007

Really good and really interesting post. I expect (and other readers maybe :)) new useful posts from you!
Good luck and successes in blogging!

GitanjaliJanuary 20, 2008

Latin... Greek.... German... Sanskrit...

Mashed potatoes.

roshan.georgeJanuary 20, 2008

There's a pattern there somewhere. Hmm...

GitanjaliJanuary 20, 2008

Why?

roshan.georgeJanuary 20, 2008

There is always a pattern.