SOJOURN

One of the most irritating things about working in a software company is not the work profile, the mediocre salary, artificial people. It's the fact that ALL companies are situated so far away from the city! One wonders if there is a hidden agenda to it. Sure, it is difficult to find a place inside the city but 40km from the city? Why, god, Why??

But fortunately mine is situated only 25km from the city and yet the journey becomes unbearable for a lot of reasons. First of all, since the place is so CLOSE to the city, my employers did not think it necessary to have a full fledged travel arrangement. So, they provided us with these safe mini-buses with extremely unsafe drivers. I shrug my shoulders and tell my co-passenger, "Occupational hazards". I can see a faint nod but that could be for the music.

And now the music! One has to really see these mini buses to understand how small they actually are. Claustrophobics please excuse. And the driver in my particular vehicle has gone to great measures to install a wonderful sound system with woofer et al. The works!, you understand. Scene satham na, like he so aptly put it. But the trouble comes later.

You see by the way my driver described the sound system i imagine you would have gotten a fair picture of the kind of music he listens to. Not Pink floyd for sure. Metallica is out of the question too. But he surprised me by listening to ilaiyaraja. I didn't think he was that kind. But i was in for more surprise. He had such a huge collection of ilaiyaraja's music that he could have done a dissertation on raja's music and he would have aced through it, although his english would have to be strictly monitored.

Naturally i also warmed up to Raja's genius. But after the usual gems I was getting a little uncomfortable. No, it wasn't the bus or the junk food from the previous day. It was, quite amazingly, Raja's music. It had a sameness that made me squirm. Same arrangements, same voices and sometimes even similar lyrics. There is no doubting Raja's genius. He remains one of the greatest composers imho. So, what then? It was the kind of movies coming out then. And also the number of movies.

Go back to the 90s and you will see a disgusting similarity in all the movies. Same hackneyed plot, horrible editing, mediocre setting. Sometimes even the milieu is the same. Strove very hard to create a sense of Deja vu, they did. And so Raja got stuck in this cess pool, one is forced to conclude. Probably the producers wanted the very same songs that managed to top the charts back then.

That leaves me with no other option but to get to my collection on the phone. Sadly the sound in the bus is so loud that, that option presented itself no more. So, i listen, still squirming. As if the journey wasn't bad enough till now, someone up there who hates me, decides to make it worse. The coup-de-grace.

My office looms large to my right. But what is the smell? The stench is getting stronger. I turn left and see only huge mountains of land with streams of paper coming out from them, strangely. Something is definitely wrong now, the smell is unbearably inhuman. I take a closer look at the mountain of land and find out it is not land after all. These were mountains of garbage. Yes, you heard it. Garbage. Huge mounds of them. For hundreds of metres. "Cruel trick" i tell that person who hates me up there.