Home coming part 2 – The train journey

“Wake up you lazy bones” my mother shouted at me.

“We still have three more hours to go” I said while sleeping.

“We are not taking a flight from here. It takes one and a half hours to reach the train station” she shouted.

“Oh yeah” I said with frustration and opened my eyes for the first time that day.

I have been sleeping for more than twelve hours a day for the last four days, yet I felt that I was not feeling mentally fresh. Something inside was bugging me for sometime as I struggled to find that bugging bug.

We started an hour later. Then we took a bus which took another hour in the traffic. One hour in the bus went like a day. I was kicked out of the seat once by a lady, I had to give up my seat for an old man once and I was standing with my neck bent for about fifty minutes. Why are the bus in Chennai so damn short? I would prefer an open top bus, but none of them were running in Chennai.

Finally, we reached the train station one hour and five minutes before schedule. Normally one has to spend five and a half hours in the train to reach Bangalore from Chennai. But, today, we had to spend six hours and thirty five minutes in the train!

As soon as I took my seat, I looked up to find a plug and a switch. What luck! I never knew that Indian railways have this facility. So, I immediately opened my laptop, plugged it in and started watching Friends from episode 141. When I reached episode 145 and Perambur (which is five kilometers from the Chennai central railway station), I got bored with Friends. Then I tried reading a book and got bored again. Finally, I started listening to some songs in my iPod. After thirty minutes, I got bored again.

“What next?” I thought. At that time, I started smelling food. To kill time, I ordered four cutlets and started eating. My thoughts started drifting from food to cricket and then to football.

After a few minutes, I started thinking about my college and Dubai. Strangely, I started missing Dubai as I was never fond of this place as long as I was there.

When I landed in Dubai, four and a half months back, I was a bit nervous. But then that nervousness was gone quickly due to conscious efforts that I took. Whatever happened in the college, how much ever assignments and exams I had, I always ensured that I ate three times a day, on time, slept as early as possible and slept for eight hours a day. It helped me to concentrate well in the class all the time. So, I never had to open my books at home, even on the exam eve. I still slept at a healthy rate of eight hours per day during the exams. I even found time to jog for half an hour every day!

I have never had so much clarity in my mind about what I was doing in my lifetime before. The first term in SP Jain was brilliant. There was no doubt that we were absolutely hammered and severely cramped for time, yet I pulled off eight hours of sleep without compromising on my studies. By far, I was at my best. No question about that.

But, by the time I completed my course in Dubai, I was not the same person I was during the start of the program. I started compromising on my breakfasts as I started sleeping late, and skipped my jogs a few times. Hence, I started losing my concentration in class.

At the end of the second term, I felt like I had lost something that I had for a long time. Classes suddenly seemed boring, waking up in the morning became a pain, sleeping early in the night became even more painful, and eating thrice a day never happened. What did I gain in losing so much? Nothing; absolutely nothing. The level of concentration and confidence that I usually had started depreciating. As Austin Powers said in one of his movies, I somehow lost my mojo and I need to do something to get it back! My mojo is absolute concentration and confidence. And both are tightly interlinked for me. If I lose one, I lose the other.

Then my thoughts came back to the train. We were half way through and so are the cutlets. Two of them were over and two to go. It started to get dark outside. When I took the first bite on the third cutlet, I started thinking about the root cause for my situation. What did I do to lose concentration on whatever I was doing? It felt weird to me. It could be due to sleeping late, or skipping breakfast, or boring subjects or a combination of all or it could be something that I haven’t figured out yet.

I knew that I need to do something to get myself back on track. Then I had a look at my plate. The cutlets were all gone now. It was totally dark outside when I started to think about my immediate future. I felt that life in Singapore was staring at me, straight on my face.

But, from the window of the train, I was staring at darkness to find some light.