A trip, which had started with an accidental smooch to 1.5x sized portrait of Madhuri Dixit inside a typical Delhi auto while rushing to station on a heavy traffic jammed evening, and had ended with no-license-no-jacket-no-helmet drive on Gurgaon highway at 3:30 winter midnight while sneaking away from highway patrol force; was the very dramatic beginning of a fortnight planned to prove Murphy's accuracy & effectiveness for eternity. The trip was so rocking that now even a normal day has turned out to be real torturous. And top of all that, suddenly my luck has changed completely against me. If you can ignore the americans, I am the most suffering victim of recession on this planet called the earth.
Next day, with a beginning of new month, still totally uninterested in office, I thought of noting down the to-do things and make use of little shiny sticky notes. after a couple of recalls & scribbles, my monitor had grown sticky notes sized hair all around the parameter. I almost felt defeated after seeing such huge population of to-do notes on my desk and gave up all the official work I was supposed to do as a part of my job. I measured the area of one sticky note and multiplied it by total number of notes. And depressingly, it was slightly larger than the area of my monitor screen !
To boost my moral support, I started planning for next trip and logged on to my ICICI bank account to confirm if I can afford any more travel. Nandita Das ki kasam, I have the strongest heart in the world because it didn't stop beating when I noticed the amount printed under the box "Total available balance" and manipulated them using mathematically trained gray cells to understand numbers and signs together, which literally meant NEGATIVE ONE LAKH TWENTY THOUSAND TWENTY FOUR ONLY. Now, I have never saved any money so absolute value of this amount was impossible to believe when it's my account. And I know I have spent a lot, but not that much that my bank balance will carry a negative sign everywhere it goes ! I smudged over the amount to make that negative sign go away but it didn't. I checked the transactions log but there was not even a single transaction with an amount in five or six digits.
Immediately, I called up ICICI bank and trust me, talking to ICICI customer care is much more severer than talking to a deaf & dumb guy over phone. After about twenty minutes, they gave me a news that the total outstanding amount of 126024 on my credit cards have been debited from my account and as I only had 6K of balance, I am seeing a final balance of -120024. Now, I only have one credit card and total outstanding is not more than 40K. I have no idea from where the hell, this other credit card's outstanding has been debited from my account. So I reported this problem to accounts department of ICICI and they said that it's a problem of credit card department. I called up credit card department and asked for the other credit card details. They said they can't give me the details over phone as I don't own the credit card and I better contact the nearby branch.(but at the same time, they can debit total outstanding for that credit card from my account. WTF !!!). So I visited the nearby branch. After about half an hour of hot discussion and counter questions, the branch manager put down his weapons and left everything once again on ICICI customer care.
The real pain started in another hour, when I realized I have a total cheques of 60K in clearing queue of my bank account and there was no way I could stop them. My 60K were drawn in an ocean of negative balance. It took around one full week, more than 20 calls to ICICI bank customer care, and 3 visits to nearby ICICI bank to make ICICI bank understand what is the actual problem. Meanwhile, I couldn't pay my internet bill, mobile bill, electricity bill, credit card bill, house rent, kaamwaali, cook, provisional store bill and every damn thing and for almost all the bills, my last payment date was falling on or before 12th of Feb.
Now, in order to survive on the face of the earth, internet is as important as oxygen in my case. As I hadn't paid the bill of internet, my connection was under suspension and it took around one full night to hack neighbor's daughter's password for their wi-fi router. But even that connection was not reliable as they had a bad habit of turning it off by 11:30 at night and go to bed. As an alternative, I called up Vodafone customer care to give me dial up connection details so that I can connect my cell phone with laptop over Bluetooth an somehow can use internet. They didn't register my request as I didn't have enough balance in my Vodafone account (thanks to ICICI, and it sucks). Disappointingly, I cut the call and checked my balance. And I have no idea why, it was running negative ! bloody hell.
Now, there had been 10 days since the month of February had started and I was out there in the world with negative 120024 in bank acount, 22 bucks in pocket, negative 30 bucks in mobile and outstanding on every possible bill. As a matter of precaution, I had stopped the payment of my salary directly to the account. Along with two other cheques, I have account payable cheques of a total 35K in my bag and I have no account to deposit them. Due to heavily busy schedule of office, finally I could manage to apply for a new account on 14th of Feb. And that is exactly how I celebrated my valentine's day. A morning appointment with Standard Chartered account manager (FYI, Male), A morning call to ICICI bank and threatening him about me complaining against ICICI in customer court (obviously, as I said 'him', it's a Male), an afternoon visit to Vodafone payment collection officer (FYI, Male !), an afternoon call with local assistant PF commissioner (this was to credit my PF as I was badly running out of cash & need not mention; all such government employees are Male), a post-afternoon visit from Airtel Internet connection technical support executive (again, Male) and finally at evening, complete body check up at hospital by a male physician. This physician was a total idiot btw. He sucked out about 20 ml of blood from my left hand for blood report and dropped the test tube on floor. I again had to lose another 20 ml from right hand :( About the final report, I was a bit tensed because I didn't want any abnormal report about lungs Xray, but shockingly, it was normal. However, the physician made a remark on eye-sight report and I had to pay additional 300 over a total amount of 700 of complete check up.
The whole bloody night, marriage hungry people kept banging the entire surrounding with cross-fading noises of shaadi songs and baraat. Indian muhoorats for marriages are losing their importance ever since someone has discovered this Valentine's day. Anyway, finally I could manage some time to breath and stay inactive in not-doing-any-single-thing-about-any-bloody-thing state on Sunday. Because of curiosity since a very long time and to make productive use of holiday, I decided to execute a mission of using Garnier Dark Brown Hair Color lying in bathroom. The habit of using any system without reading the instruction manual is really harmful when your luck is not in your favor. I mixed up everything that came along with the packet and started waiting for the semi liquid substance to turn brown from white. It didn't. It didn't for next ten minutes. It didn't for another half an hour. By that time, I completely had lost my patience and control as it was hard to sustain the acidic smell of whatever was there in that small container. I started applying that not-at-all-turning-brown mixture onto my hair just the way they say; start from root and reach till the top. Given the amount of protein I have invested on my scalp, it took around half an hour to involve each and every hair into this colorful revolution. And as an outcome, in the mirror, I was looking at some big cone shaped thing over my head that exactly looked like tail of a wild squirrel who has just made it's way from a bucket of Fevicol. Before this, I had never realized that if my hair can stand straight 90o from my scalp, I am 7-9 inches more taller than what I am normally. Meanwhile, a friend called up and while talking over phone, accidentally a couple of drops went inside Windows Mobile and it screwed up the speaker of that PDA. (Didn't I tell you? before this, my Nokia phone had committed suicide for some mysterious reasons and I had to borrow a friend's PDA).
So, I didn't want Japanese ramp models with honeybee nest over their head feel jealous about my new hairstyle. I stood under the shower and tried to wash away those chemicals from my head. A few drops had a ride through my mouth and left a taste of lemon added gin. After a literal hard work of couple of minutes, I was totally chemical free and eager to see the multicolored hair in the mirror. Sadly, they all looked black. I turned on all possible light sources and searched for a brown hair again, but didn't find any. I plucked out two three hair and stared at them against the sunlight but no response. Either I have turned colorblind or my hair are so affectionate to their natural color that really didn't react at all against those color catalysts. This entire adventurous operation had costed me a clean bathroom which had just turned into a disastrous holi site. Later, the next day, my kaamwali claimed some extra money to clean it up.
Alongside, a nasty rat had sneaked into my house and it ruined one of my shirts, my jacket, my roommate's sweater, two bedsheets and a bedding. To scare him, I started feeding a street cat. There was something special in the food and she had grown real brave. One day, she made three puppies run away from ground floor just by single roar (in our case, miew !) and I have three eye witnesses of her bravery. But even she couldn't catch hold of this mouse. I so missed my college days, when we had an assassin's weapon called the bible of electrical technology; capable of killing even a dog with one single shot over head. Few months back, I had seen a commercial on TV about Mortein Rat Killer with caption Ise choohe ek baar khaakar, mare baahar jaa kar. Highly influenced by Mortien, I decided to get them one more customer and bought a small pack, enough to assault one small mouse. Guess that rat liked the taste of this Mortein Rat Killer added with sugar a lot that it ate it all and instantly died somewhere below my bed. I was not aware about this at all until the dead body of that mouse started smelling and it reached the peak of it's intensity in no time by rule of exponential increment.
Somehow; betrayed by two world class brands one by one (Garnier & Mortein); I managed to clean that mess below my thousand KGs heavy bed. This mission unveiled a huge collection beneath the elephant like bed; comprising of two ladies accessories magazine, couple of 50 paisa coins, two visiting cards of nearby beauty parlour, few match boxes, two broken cigarettes and a pack of Kamasutra dots condom. I never had such breakthrough so it was definitely not mine, neither it belongs to my roommate as I know him very well. After a couple of forensic investigations, we inferred that it must belong to the girls who were living in this house before we moved in. And this unused gears are still here either because they over-estimated their boyfriends or their boyfriends were as unlucky as us. And by that time, it was the end of Sunday. The last damage occurred to my personal property while this fortnight was, my laptop's wi-fi controller switch broke into two pieces. I love this laptop and it has been serving me 24x7 since the day I bought it. But, every good thing has an age, beyond that, they hardly survive.
Anyway, so here I am. Most of the messes mentioned above are as it is; and I am looking forward for a better days when I don't have to obey murphy's laws in such strict manner. Hopefully, this month end, when I am off for another trip !
