Re: The Chennai Chronicles

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Re: The Chennai Chronicles

What happened

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Re: The Chennai Chronicles

DAY - 1

The dull murmur of voices in the partitioned cubicles. The clickety-clack of keyboards and mice reverbating all around. The incessant ringing of desk-phones. The incognito window of Chrome with multiple tabs of contraband. The Friday was unusually dull and lifeless. I looked at the clock - 3 hours of dullness still to go.


"Mishra, tonight Chennai again"


This statement, often made the late hours of Fridays, wasn't new or unusual to me. The first time I heard that statement three months ago, it was a 30-hour mission for me to rush to Chennai, grab 3 hours of sleep, spend 8 hours at the client location, and rush back with reports. A mission which I had accomplished well enough to be considered the prime candidate for weekend runs to Chennai. And I never complained. If someone would ask a rider to ride on a weekend, and reimburse his fuel and food bills as well, only a moron would refuse!!! The cream on the cake was that the schedule for this particular trip was not a time-restricted one, and trip merged perfectly with my plan to spend a lazy weekend by the seaside. Several weeks of punching keys inside a four-by-four cubicle had taken their toll on my nerves and I was yearning for a good break with my significant other - the initial plan was to ride down to Pondicherry for the weekend and stretch the leave till Monday. Now the plan became a lot more lighter on the pocket - afterall, they'd only check your fuel bills, not your GPS log


Elated, I logged out early at 1700H and hopped home. It was a Friday and the most advisable course of action was to get out of city limits before the weekend rush started - which meant crossing the Electronics City before 1900H. Unfortunately, the approval mails were too late in coming, and I, all ready to roll, kept glancing hopelessly at the clock and the idle inbox. When the clock struck 19:30, I decided I had enough. Without wasting any more time, I rushed down to the parking with my significant other and thumbed the starter. The clock on the console read 19:40. I shifted into 1st gear. It was 20:30 before I could shift into second gear - thanks to the crawling traffic, and it was a steady flight afterwards, all the way till the Shoolagiri McDonalds, where we pulled over for a quick stoppie. A glance at my emails confirmed that my approvals were in place. Two burgers and a coke later, we were hurtling through the dark.


The only pic I managed to click on day-1


The ride from Krishnagiri onwards was exceptionally smooth. Pampered with negligible traffic and silky roads, the red devil was begging to be flogged. I had set myself a target cruising speed of 85 km/h - but that speed seemed too serene for the roads - and there were several occasions when I'd look down at the console - only to see three icy blue digits smiling back at me and a red needle playing touch-me-not with the '6' and '7' markers on the tacho. All the while I'd try to make the numbers behave themselves, I'd try to keep two digits on the speedo instead of three, but the third digit would always pop back in like a little naughty kid before I could notice. The antics of the numbers were just like the mischief of kids - you couldn't approve of it, but you couldn't help smiling at it either, and eventually, you let it be. My flirting with the digits on the console continued long enough to forget everything else, and it was only when I felt severe pangs of hunger, did I realize that I was long past Ambur.


The realization came with a tinge of added disappointment when I realized that it was past 11PM and most of the wayside restaurants and dhabas were shut already. I turned to my wife to ask why she didn't remind me - only to notice her lazily relishing romantic songs on noise-isolating earbuds inside her helmet. I sighed to myself - there was little else I could do except riding on - and so I continued with my eyes scanning both sides of the road for any watering hole. Relief came at around midnight when I spotted a dimly-lit wayside tavern a few minutes after crossing Vellore. We had a fill of mutta-parathas and tea, before heading off towards Chennai at a slower pace owing to bad roads all the way from Vellore to Chennai. A few minutes past 1AM I pulled off the highway towards Koyambedu. A search for hotels turned out to be a daunting task, with most hotels eyeing us with suspicion, but finally managed to hunt down a place with a suitable parking spot for the night. Sign off time: 0200H.

Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Just what the doctor ordered... awesome... bring it on.. post the rest of it..

----consecutive posts auto-merged-----

Is baar humari party ko vote dena... lol

Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Day -2


An wall-mounted split AC with 'Turbo Chill', preset to 16 degrees celcius, having only a solitary on-off button and no other controls ensured that we either froze to death by switching it on or sweated to death by switching it off. Yes sire, some considerate guest had been kind enough to steal the remote which housed all the controls, and the concept of a blanket had been unheard of among budget hotels in Chennai. Five gruelling hours later, I was shuffling through my backpack with grubby eyes, hunting for ID cards, paperwork and stuff. The day ahead was going to be a busy one, and it was best to start early. We rushed through the tea and breakfast session at a bakery opposite the hotel and leaving my wife at the hotel, I pushed off towards the client's office.


The spirited, 110kph cruising had taken some toll on the engine and when I had rolled into Chennai the previous night, the engine was rough and grinding. It was not unusual, and I expected it to perform normally once the engine had cooled down. By now, the engine had a six hour rest, and I expected the red devil to start a new day with a new vigour, but no, it didn't - it still had that drab note and a rough feel about it. No amount of cajoling and coaxing helped - it just refused to live up to it's usual peppy nature. In all probability, it was the oil which was failing - I guessed a thicker oil would help, considering the higher temperatures at Chennai. Lost in thoughts about the loss in performance, I proceeded to lose myself among the crowd of 'tagged' professionals inside the mirror-glassed maze of buildings inside DLF IT park till 1400H.


If the morning had been busy, the sequence of events that afternoon could be best described as chaotic.


Sitting inside the glass-walled bulding, I had chalked out a plan to ride down to Tirusulam after lunch. Tirusulam was one of my favorite hangouts when I was a resident of Chennai - a hillock adjoining the Airport road which provided a secluded, peaceful and harmonious view of the chaotic city below. The highlight of the place was that it overlooked the three major lifelines of Chennai - the National Highway, the Railway track and the Runway. Every couple of minutes, a streaking green EMU would snake through the almost-invisible railway tracks or a huge A330 would make a gracious touchdown among the foreground of an endless swarm of cars proceeding like a disciplined queue of ants. The memories were warm and vivid, and I yearned to be at Tirusulam again.


I managed to get past DLF gates by 14:30. My GPS indicated that the nearest Honda ASC was KSN Honda, 5 kms away. I was there before long, and a lena guy grumpily carried about the business of the oil change, charging me 100 bucks for the service. A request to get the chain and sprockets cleaned was turned down rudely. Matchless Honda Service, sigh.
The engine still felt gnarly, making me doubt whether the oil change had any real impact on engine behaviour at all. I picked up my wife from the hotel, we had a quick lunch and proceeded towards the Airport. There were unusual amounts of cops on standby on every road junction, which I attributed to some political rally. It took me quite some time to find the narrow, kutcha road which led to the hilltop and having close to one hour wasted in wrong turns and route corrections, I was finally climbing up the steep hill. The broken road, however, seemed to suggested that it had not been accessed since long. It seemed pretty unusual - five years go, this had been a hotspot for walkers and joggers, and given the beauty of the place, it was unusual that localites would abandon a beautiful vantage spot in ruins.


Six hairpin bends later, i was on the hilltop, facing something that looked like a huge lump of charcoal, wrapped in a sack.
As I went closer, the sack-wrapped lump of charcoal suddenly stood up and blocked my path with a lathi - Damn, it was a cop!!!!! I turned off my ignition and took off my helmet - wearing a helmet was against the law in Chennai, and I, wearing my full-face LS2 and leather gloves, was subconsciously aware that he was looking at me menacingly. He was almost five feet eight tall and three feet wide, and guessing from his build, he must have been heavier than the CBR! In all probability, judging from his look, he was assuming me to be a miscreant trying to hide my face with a helmet. Just how many miscrants rode a CBR, I wondered. And by the way, wasn't Pulsar the favorite motorcycle for miscreants? (There was a legend that owners of black Pulsars were targeted by cops in a certain city in India, labeling them as miscreants - and I was warned against owning a black Pulsar!)


For the next 15 minutes, the 300-pound hulk of a cop entertained himself with my explanations, barely picking up one word per sentence, and finally all he could say was:
Paablic no yentry. Rumba daenger. yenna-something-something-something-pandi. I looked dejectedly at him and tried to ask him again "saar, this place...closu? paarmanente closu?" The accent helped, but his reply didn't help much. All I could gather from his reinfored tamil reply were references to police, restricted area and Narendra Nodi. So, thanks to NaMo's election campaign, my ride to Tirusulam ended in abject disappointment. The next half-hour was spent at a railway crossing, watching "slimmer" motorcycles slip through a gap in the gates after giving me a sympathetic look. The gate was not opened until atleast 15 EMUs had passed by, and it was only after a collective honking from a dozen cars and a lone, red motorcycle at the gates that the gatekeeper shouted something into his walkie-talkie and finally opened the gates. It was already 1700H, a good three hours wasted. My next checkpoint was Thiruvanmiyur Beach, where I had a rendezvous planned at 1800H with a group of riders from Chennai and the designated meetup point was at Thiruvanmiyur RTO, where fellow rider Sriram ( @SriramEfunds) would meet me and escort me further.


Dusk at Thiruvanmiyur


After crawling along a traffic infested road, I finally reached a designated meeting point. Immediately afterwards, I was joined by a white Karizma - it was Sriram who had no trouble identifying me from the KA-registered CBR. He led the route and we reached an italian joint next to the beach. We were soon joined by others, a jolly group of eight to ten riders, and almost instantly lost ourselves in bike-chatter. In the midst of this chatter, I found myself talking to one of the riders in particular, Sagar ( @Sagar Banerjee) and the talk gradually evolved into a planning for a ride the following morning. The destination was undecided - it could be anywhere along the ECR, as long as we could catch the sunrise on the sea. The plan seemed good enough - spend a good, leisurely day along the ECR with our better halves. As long as we had sea, sun and fun, who cared whether it was Chennai, Pondy or Kanyakumari?


We split up at 19:30 and after some more loafing around - which included an unplanned visit to the 8th Century Parthasarathy Swamy temple, an end-to-end ride on the festively decorated Marina beach and some awesome filter kaapi at Elliots Beach, we were back at the hotel by 22:30. I had a short discussion with my wife regarding the next days' plan, and she too seemed more interested with the new plan instead of riding all the way to Pondy. Since we hadchecked in at 0200H previous night, we had the hotel till 0200H, and I managed to coax the cashier to extend the checkout time to 0400H. We crashed by 23:30H in an attempt to make up for two sleepless nights in a matter of 5 hours.


Strolling around on Elliots Beach

Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Err, dostaana?

Aren't you both married?

Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Yes..we both have 2 wives each...what say Sagar???

Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Absolutely....

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Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Nahi bhai 1 hi bahut bhari par rahi hai.. not anymore! Lol

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Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Kyun bhai...Black wali (P220) ko divorce de diya kya????

Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Bhai Dat's my girlfriend not wife...

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Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Enough OTs.

Please continue with the log now.

Tapatalk'd from my stupid phone!

Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Jo hukum boss
The sky was a dull shade of grey with only a few streaks of red indicating the spot where the sun was scheduled to appear. A blast of the misty morning air was forcing its way into my helmet through the ventilators, whistling a shrill note and giving the slightest nip of coolness. The crisply painted white lines rapidly disappeared under our tyres. The new engine oil had started flowing through the veins of the engine and it was smoothly purring along, although the speedo was indicating a rapid 92km/h. A few metres ahead of me, Sagar's P220 tore through patches of light fog which hung on the highway, creating tunnels in the air. The magnificient ECR was mostly empty and the rest of the world was still enjoying their Sunday morning slumber. I had no recollection of waking up, packing all our backpacks and leaving the hotel. I came to my full senses only after the cool winds whistled noisily into my helmet, rejuvenating me thoroughly.


A few kilometers past MGM, the sky gradually brightened up and the red streaks bled into a bright red patch on the horizon - the sunrise wasnt far away. I signalled Sagar to pull over and after a short discussion, we branched off the ECR into the tiny hamlet-village of Kovalam where we reached just in time to catch a glimpse of the pinkish red sun popping sneaking out of the water. Heaving our luggage and gears we moved closer to the sea. After numerous sunsets over the sea, I was finally witnessing a sunrise over the sea, maybe after ages. We lost ourselves in the orange glow of the sunrise, absorbing the tranquil and trying to capture as much of the beauty as our tiny lenses would allow. Our pillions, however, were not relishing the moment as much as we did - having sacrificed their sleep, both the ladies were slightly grumpy and swollen-eyed. All of us readily agreed un a cuppa to get our blood flowing, but much to our disappointment, there wasn't a single vendor in sight. The cuppa had to wait till the next halt - Mamallapuram a.k.a Mahabalipuram.


A beautiful sunrise captured after long...


Sun Chasers! with @Sagar Banerjee

Having re-traced out path to the ECR, we gunned towards Mamallapuram full throttle. The sun, having changed it's hue from Orange to Gold, now shone brightly down our visors. The chill which penetrated our helmets gradually vanished and the road gradually started buzzing with people. We pulled off the ECR and drove into Mamallapuram at 0730H. Even at this hour, the place was teeming with people - dozens of cars and a sizeable column of motorcycles dotted the parking area. A pack of tourist buses had already let loose their swarms of shrieking, yelling, littering tourists all over the place. Trinket shops all over had opened up early for a share of the brisk business, and vendors shouted their advertisements at the top of their lungs. So much for my peaceful day by the seaside! We nevertheless proceeded to fulfil our most pressing need of the hour - a hot cup of tea - and while the riders lost themselves in bike-chatter over the warm tea, the pillions lost themselves elsewhere (see pic below!)


A tea break. Meanwhile the ladies....



Ouch!

An hour by the seaside, we started getting wary. The sun was getting hotter every minute, there were just the first tinglings of hunger, and strolling along the sand aimlessly was no fun. A reminder of a long day ahead of us prevented us from entering the water too - we had no spare clothing handy, and even if we had, there was no place for a changeover. No, we couldn' risk getting ourselves wet or sandy. That's when Sagar suggested a shack a bit further, which would afford a good view of the sea while we relished our breakfast and relaxed in the shade. I was game, we picked our bikes and made for the rustic shack where a couple of Europeans lounged languidly amidst a profusion of empty tables. We dumped our gear and luggage on one of the tables and spread out. The scrambled eggs which we had for breakfast were nothing to write home about though Pooja claims she was better off with her chicken sandwich. We took our own sweet time finishing breakfast and then lounged languidly looking at the seaside, chattering away nonchalantly, occassionally rising in an energetic fit to click something and again settling down.


A welcome view!






We had another good photosession before we got moving from the shack. The sun was now bearing down harshly and walking on the sand with our stuff seemed more of a punishment than pleasure. Returning to the crowded market,we gulped down some soft drinks each, and decided that the best course of action would be to return to Chennai. We could of course stop over at any of the other attractions on the way and spend some time, we decided as we mounted our bikes. However, once we got moving, the desire to stop anywhere on the way gradually diminished. At the least, the windblast was keeping us cool as long as we were on the move. We had a spirited ride all the way till we entered the city limits and spotting a tender coconut seller, we pulled over for a break. As we stopped, a team of Harleys, led by our own @sunnysideup passed us in a massive gleam of chrome. Sagar was quick to notice and acknowledge, while I was still recovering from the daze of the shiny mean machines dazzling in the sunlight.

Re: The Chennai Chronicles

Nyc pic and awesome write-up...... CBR have a tendancy to move to 3 digits as her elder sister.. It difficult to keep her stady at 2 digit speed.. Typical Honda machine.. A very nice bike.. And you are using it well.. Loved your all posts...