कथाकार

A cold and rainy day in a hill town is scary and at the same time it is lovely. A December night, rainy and chilly, the unseasonal rain had worsen the weather. I was waiting for my college bus during a weekend, which usually departs at 8 PM from the city center to my college campus, situated in jungles outside the outskirts of the city. There were hardly six or seven of us waiting for the bus. All of them were unknown faces and mostly were workers from the neighboring village of our college campus. It was a cold day, even the known faces would have been difficult to recognize, given everyone was under the cover, masked by mufflers or monkey caps or both.  The era of smart phone zombies was yet to arrive. Forget about smart phones, even normal mobile phones were rare those days, and hence time pass at the bus stop was a little harder. So chit chat was the best time pass. While looking for the know faces, I recognized one familiar face. It took a while to realize, that a shy & cu...

Deja vu My life took me to a city called Noida, which is rain deprived. Howbeit, today the nature was generous on the desert city, it was raining like there is no tomorrow. It was Friday and I had some weekend commitments in New Delhi, so I decided to leave early. It was raining since morning, the otherwise bright and hot Noida was looking gloomy, wet and cooler. At 4:30 evening, it was as dark or as bright as 4:30 AM. The issue with almost all the metro cities or for that matter all the cities in India is, that they are not able to or prepared to handle rains. It happens in the city of Mumbai, where rainfall is generous and a day or two dry days during the monsoon months are Golden or in NCR, where a day or two of rain in the monsoon season are little two much. Traffics have another connection to rains. Come the rains, you will have immediate traffic jams. God knows why. I kept on moving towards Delhi, avoiding all the big jams until I reached just near the coveted DND flyover. The tr...