Pinheads in Pune

Here's a quick question for you to answer :

If you checked out flights to Delhi, with your final destination being Shimla, googled for tourist spots in Kerala and considered the merits of a taxi trip through the Western Ghats in Karnataka, where would you finally end up?

1. Shimla
2. Some place in Kerala
3. Some place in Karnataka
4. None of the above

Well, this objective question seems to be a bit subjective. In our case (myself, TD and Seal), the correct answer turned out to be 4 - we ended up going to Pune in Maharashtra.

On our journey to Pune on a Sunday night in a KSRTC bus, we were treated to Run - a movie which I had already seen on TV (not exactly watchable, except for the cute Bhumika Chawla). The next day had No Entry (a "no brains necessary" comedy, and a huge hit at that), following which a trailer for Veer-Zaara flashed past the screen. TD had just about stopped cribbing about it when out came a familiar and ominous vrooming followed by, what else, but Dhoom. Thankfully the "cult classic" couldn't continue for long as we had reached the Pune bus stand by then. From there we hailed an autorickshaw and proceeded to meet our local benefactor, Ananth (popularly known as Figure). (In Pune, the autorickshaws display the distance you have travelled, which when multiplied by 6 and summed up with 2 yields the actual fare. I prefer the Bangalore method, a no-brainer - just dish out the amount displayed, provided it is within reasonable limits)

In the evening, we roamed around the "happening" areas of Pune - Fergusson College Road (FC Road) named after Fergusson College and the Junglee Maharaj Road. While we loafed around, we noticed one strange thing - a large number of people, especially females had scarves wound around their faces, presumably to counter the deleterious effects of the heavily polluted air of Pune. Hell, I even spotted some talking through their scarves!!!

The staple diet of Maharashtra seems to be Vada Pav. Seal, the erstwhile Mumbai cha Mulga (Marathi for "son of Mumbai") displayed a marked inclination to drool over the omnipresent "delicacy" and could hardly stop chanting its name. Naturally, we got fed up of this whole pav business.

We retired for the night with plans to proceed to Mahabaleshwar the next morning.

Next : Morons in Mahabaleshwar

Tags : Travel

Posted by Rajat @ 10:30 PM