November 24, 2007

Getting back home - Raja Hamsa

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

Posted by roshan.george under Bangalore, India, Madras, Travel |

22 Comments »

  1. Yes yes but what is Raja Hamsa?

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

    Comment by Marc — November 24, 2007 @ 4:19 pm

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

    Pipe is nuts.

    Comment by roshan.george — November 24, 2007 @ 4:40 pm

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

    Comment by sindhu — November 24, 2007 @ 6:00 pm

  4. 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.

    Comment by roshan.george — November 24, 2007 @ 6:17 pm

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

    Comment by sindhu — November 24, 2007 @ 8:32 pm

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

    Comment by roshan.george — November 24, 2007 @ 8:55 pm

  7. 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).”

    Comment by Marc — November 24, 2007 @ 9:24 pm

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

    Comment by Marc — November 24, 2007 @ 9:24 pm

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

    Comment by roshan.george — November 24, 2007 @ 11:23 pm

  10. 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

    Comment by sindhu — November 25, 2007 @ 2:30 pm

  11. 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.

    Comment by roshan.george — November 25, 2007 @ 3:59 pm

  12. 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?

    Comment by Marc — November 25, 2007 @ 5:39 pm

  13. 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.

    Comment by roshan.george — November 25, 2007 @ 5:47 pm

  14. 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.

    Comment by Isha — November 25, 2007 @ 11:39 pm

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

    Comment by roshan.george — November 25, 2007 @ 11:49 pm

  16. 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 :)

    Comment by Isha — November 26, 2007 @ 1:32 am

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

    Comment by roshan.george — November 26, 2007 @ 12:24 pm

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

    Comment by HeavyGod — November 27, 2007 @ 2:27 pm

  19. Latin… Greek…. German… Sanskrit…

    Mashed potatoes.

    Comment by Gitanjali — January 20, 2008 @ 3:28 pm

  20. There’s a pattern there somewhere. Hmm…

    Comment by roshan.george — January 20, 2008 @ 5:43 pm

  21. Why?

    Comment by Gitanjali — January 20, 2008 @ 5:50 pm

  22. There is always a pattern.

    Comment by roshan.george — January 20, 2008 @ 6:01 pm

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