It all started with a three-digit bang. Well, to be entirely fair, it had started a week before, with him snooping around my IRCTC account, ruining my the surprise I had intended on giving him: interrupting his trip abruptly at the Dhanbad station, greeting him with a potla of Dhanbadi littis he seems to dote on. So, he knew I was about to manifest myself at the station. Cutting a lanky figure across the doorway of the train chugging slowly inside the Dhanbad station, there he was, his head absolutely disheveled from the 20 hour journey, vaguely resembling Jack Nicholson (which he would do often in the latter parts of the trip, almost every single time he would take off his glasses and stare wide-eyed and intently through his 15-cent coin sized eyes that he accuses me of possessing instead!) from his barmy-period in The Shining. His much backbroken-about GRE exam was due the next morning in Kolkata. He always complained we never had our "thing". Indubitably, it's got to be "The Rush". Our thing is "The Rush". We had rushed every darn time, to every darn place. To the GRE centre, to catch the trains at New Jalpaiguri, Kolkata and Delhi stations, every single time that we have been there, to catch the buses from every dusty bus-stand, to catch the Tata Sumo's so much a part of an average Indian traveling fleet, and it still somehow manages to evoke the same unrelenting panic inside us, which goes on to say, we still haven't got used to it.

Rotorized Motor Paneer at Hotel Moti

The Rang De Basanti dhaba at Salt Lake Kolkata was the place that got us to believe we have a fall-back career no matter what, a possibility that seems highly inviting given Major 331 will move on to greener pastures. :P