NAZAR K SAAMNE.....and now JIGAR K PAAS

I'll be true to you...i write blogs to learn something, to master this art of wasting ink and also for some respect like.."arre waah yeh to BLOG likhta hai"
And so i respect the criticisms, if there are any...but for this post...i dont give a fuck to any criricism...as this is my heart in front of you...this is dedicated to ME....(sorry for that 4 letter word..couldn't help it.)

So today , was yet another goofed up bunk….’GOOFED UP’.. I use this word because I find it interesting, count it among those words of which you don’t know anything but use them because they sound interesting, make even a piece of crap look like something serious. So coming back…another bunk…added with the news of my current attendance score as 70% made the whole day a little creepy. 70 % is not that bad a call, but when you have to deal with a fine of 400 per % below 75 that call becomes a scream , a LAMENT rather. So with dreams of mastering LINUX still struggling to prosper, Bill Gates’ “The road ahead” suffocating somewhere below the pillow and attendance drooping to an all time low..i thought of blogging…thought of penning something great , something …..something as luscious as those seekh kebabs, something tasty as that ‘late’ coffee at that ‘late’ Nescafe ..something as steamy as that por…oops!!....but something about that time ….when we made a trip…a trip down memory lane…a trip down holy lane….where probably half a century ago….my father was born…..implying technicaly…that on some unlucky (depends)day ,I was born too…


So back to 18th oct 2009……an ‘EVENING WITH A DIFFERENCE’…….
The evening had started…. Rather jostled to start…some friends had visited my place…as they said, to‘wish Diwali’..and as I took it,…’to burn fire crackers out of me’. With a whole lot of witty bombs and great no.of NON VEG. ROCKETS.(code for obscene talks)……shooting up to the sky…I was easily shown dust in that war of wits. I was being made fun of ..i was joked about, I was being done at everything that I used to do to people before, but this time I was just looking ,partly at the clock to chao my friends off….and partly looking at the door just in case anybody might here those largely on the air NON VEG. The clock ticked 9, friends were off and in came a news. Babba (father) had won bucks at a cards party, he did lost some playing blind, but thankfully the deal came out positive and thus destiny decided upon a memorable evening for us.


So the party started with a cousin added, and within a white Honda City we(uncle aunt,amma, babba, cousin, me) started off… babba was exploring Lucknow to my cousin…..you see …I am thought of as a home-alone kind of a guy…who knows nothing about lko except that he also lives there. But things have started to change…I also had started exploring the city and this was the time I wanted to tell it all. Who does not want to impress upon a cousin landed straight from Mumbai and that too…from an aeroplane?. Unluckily I never got a chance….and I too…saw..the university..colvin etc etc much like a tourist….the urge to speak that ‘I know too’ grew irresistible…and luckily one voice from behind came ….”whats that” and I yelled …vomited(more accurate)..”that’s saadat ali’s tomb…under control of ASI”…a bit hush hush from behind and I thought I had won the war…I was elated…until I realized that it was time to dine…more than that it was time to show my culinary knowledge as since 2 years I had been WIKIing lucknow’s taste laboriously. Well, it’s a dream of every lucnowi to sit in a famous non veg joint with his guest and tell him/her about the cuisines, not important whether he likes the dish or not, not important whether he fills his tummy…he should like one’s knowledge, he should fill his mind. And I saw such a moment coming before me .


Again unluckily I didn’t get a chance… I proposed ‘shakhawat’ for dinner…plea rejected and here again pops had won,ordering dishes that I had never even heard of..let alone telling facts about it. I silently ate it all cursing Tim Berners-Lee (founder of world wide web) and Wikipedia.

So the day was coming to an end …after being the subject of friend’s pranks and then with a broken dream of exploring lucknow to everybody we were heading to have paan ..of which I seriously had no idea.

The paan shop was not found and instantly it was decided to visit Nazarbagh. ‘NAZARBAGH’….this is the word that easily would be the most heard word for me….heard sometimes from my mother ….with twinkling eyes…sometimes from my father..with a nostalagic throat….this word was always there for me….it was a place which was my first home after the maternity ward of Lady Dufferin’s..but still I never had any sentiment to it…nazarbagh for me was just a place and 69, Nazarbagh( a mansion built by my great grandfather a century ago) was just a house where by chance my father got born and by his choice I also had the chance of calling it my first home…but as you see I never seriously and sincerely honoured this fact.

So with chitters and chatters the ‘white Honda City’ moved on….it kept on moving ….until it stopped and with that stopped the race that the people in that car (except me) were running to survive in life..for the 4 people in that car (amma, babba, uncle, aunt), the race converted to a walk down the isles of the rosy past whose petals had nurtured them to become the strong individuals that they were. We had reached Nazarbagh and now we were in a place that had ,to me, stories to tell. All of them were looking at those buildings , those landmarks, where they had played cricket, where probably they had their first smoke, got drunk for the maiden time, and perhaps had fallen in love umpteenth times.

Seeing a mixed bag of emotions I too asked my mother “apnaa waala ghar kaun saa hai ….wo to dikhaao”…..and amma with 4 years of residential experience but with 40 years of storytelling guided me through a ‘little more’ broader lane and there stood a daunting white building…recently whitewashed…and on the backdrop was my mothers commentary….”yahaan babba money-plant lagaate the..yahaan khidkiyon pe grill nahi lagi thi….i didn’t know why, I didn’t know why…but I also was swimming in the pool of Nazarbagh….i started imagining myself as a child…how I used to cry? how I would have started to learn walking on foot…i tried to capture that 100 year old monument but the 2 megapixcel glitter didnt prove enough.


Meanwhile babba’s nostalagia was overflowing ….as I could hear…Laal Makaan and Pista Niwas was same as ever…those roads were not a complex organic compound of carbon, but had been a mirror where my uncle and babba were on a past expedition. I used to think that living out of home,in a hostel and now independently, I have enjoyed and will have memories that my father would always be devoid of. I got to know that day ..how wrong I was… as my father, too had an exubherent past which was having a showdown for me that night right after diwali.

With the heart and eyes longing for more , but brain longing for some sleep, we moved to our homes..having a hard time to accept that nazarbagh is not ours now..we finally accepted the fact that ‘property 50-60 saalo se zyaada nahi rehti’…

So the day ended . I ,who wanted to impress upon my cousin had to be content with her e mail id. And then at the doorsteps, babba finally admitted that today he had grown sentimental…somewhere there my heart also clicked, not because father was growing senti…perhaps I had started growing senti for nazarbagh…I , from now on had started honouring the fact that 69, Nazarbagh was my first abode after the cesarean in the maternity ward at Lady Dufferins’