Losing my …

One day, about couple of months back, I had come back to my hostel room from my college after a day of classes. My phone was out of charge, so I looked in my bag for my phone charger as I had taken it to college with me. It was not there in my bag, I was using it in college and I thought I had forgotten it there. So I called up a friend, who was sitting next to me in campus and who was still sitting there and asked her to check if my charger is there. She said it wasn’t. So I checked for it again in my room only to find it plugged in my multi-plug. Apparently, I had already taken the charger out, put it in the multi-plug and was searching for it in my bag again. This kind of thing happens to me all the time. Half my life is spent searching for something because I cannot remember where I kept it. I lose a lot of things and I also lose my way very often. This blog post is about some incidents that happened in both these areas.

I was going to write this post much before, but I lost the paper in which I had written down the title and points for it, twice.

I lose so many things that when I play the “Which song best describes you?” game on Facebook I get "pichle saath dinom me maine khoya". I sometimes even manage to lose things in a manner that even my mom can’t find them. 

Keys are number one in the list of things I lose. My losing keys habit can single handedly sustain the steel industry in India. I lost my hostel keys so many times that my roommates stopped giving me a key, so I ended up losing the lock. My first week in MBA college I lost my room keys, I searched for it only to get it back it from the bag of a friend who lived in the opposite room to me. I lost the key again couple of weeks after, by this time my friend who had the key earlier had moved to some other college. Nevertheless I still called him up to make sure that he didn’t have my keys. I haven’t found the keys since. Once during a trip with my friends, we managed to lose the horn in our rented car. It didn’t just stop working, we lost it. The horn was working fine one moment and suddenly there was no sound, we thought there was some problem with the horn and took it to a mechanic only for him to tell us that there was no horn in the car. I once managed to lose a SIM card from inside my phone. I lost my customized sweatshirt which has my name on it, twice. Luckily both times it came back to me as it has my name on it. I once lost every proof that I had a bank account including the passbook, the ATM card and all relevant receipts. I lost an assignment once, searched for it for two days and couldn’t find it. I went to the faculty to tell him that I had lost my assignment and that I need more time to redo it only for him to tell me that I had already submitted the assignment.

If I just kept writing about the stuff I lost it would never end so I will now switch to the instances when I lost my way. 

1. There is a drive-in beach in Kerala called Muzhupilangad. A drive-in beach is one where you can ride a bike or drive a car right on the beach. If you are ever in Kannur in Kerala, this beach is a must visit. Take a car or bike (Preferably not your own as the beach stinks up your vehicle) and then have awesome fun driving up and down the beach. If it is low tide you can even drive to an island in an SUV. My friends and I were once on the beach in two bikes and a car. It was almost 7 in the evening and the vehicles were parked on one end of the beach, me and my friend Roshan took one of the bikes and went riding up the beach, when we came back we couldn’t find the car, we searched the entire beach two three time and still couldn’t find the car. We didn’t have our phones on us so we took a phone from a stranger and called one of our friends only for them to tell us that they hadn’t budged from where they were. And indeed when we went back to the same spot they were there. To this day Roshan and I believe that they lied and that they had actually moved away from there. 

      

      2. Like Batman has The Joker, Superman has Lex Luthor, Spiderman has green goblin and Rahul Gandhi has, well himself, mine is the Pune- Bangalore Highway. You would think it is hard for a person to get lost on a straight road but I have managed it, thrice. The problem with this road is that it doesn’t really have proper exits, so I always get lost trying to find one. The road is quite near my college and this is where you get buses to go to Mumbai, so I go there quite often to drop and pick my friends who go to and come back from Mumbai. Once while coming back after dropping a friend I didn’t want to take the right turn back from where I came from as it was not allowed. As a good citizen and somebody who follows traffic rules I didn’t take the right but instead went to the left to take a U-turn. Turns out there wasn’t one, so I kept going forward to find a U-Turn. I would have gone ahead some 4 kilometers and still hadn’t found one, I finally ended up turning around the bike around at a break in the divider breaking about 5 traffic rules in one go. Since then I always took the first right turn back, better break 1 traffic rule than 5.

Not even a week later I found myself lost on the same highway again, this time in a car with some friends. We had set off towards a dam which was on an inner road nowhere near the highway. But somehow we ended up lost on the Bangalore-Pune highway again. At least this time it was not my fault.

The third time was on the eve of my birthday. My friend was coming back from Mumbai and he wanted to attend my midnight birthday celebrations. It was just an hour before my birthday and I was waiting to pick him from the bus stop. He calls me up at around 11.30 and says that he has got down about 5 kilometers before the bus stop as there is some problem with the bus. I asked him to start walking from there and that I will come on the bike and pick him up. I picked him up on the highway and then got on to the service road so as to go to the other side through an underpass below the highway. After going for about 100 meters the service road stopped abruptly with a 5 feet drop. The road had ended. I had to turn my bike and do some risky off-road riding to get back on the road. It was well past 12 now and my phone was constantly ringing from all the friends waiting to celebrate my birthday and not finding where I am. I finally reached back to college at about 12.30. My birthday bumps where a little harder than normal that day.

3. Another time I was going to a college in Lavale, some 20 kilometers away to pick up a friend. The straightforward route was through the Pune-Bangalore highway and there was an alternate route through some inner roads which was about 5 kilometers shorter. Because of my history with the highway and the distance saved I decided to take the latter one. I had gone only once previously on this route about 6 moths back and I didn’t really remember it exactly. So I called up a friend of mine who was with me when we went on this route 6 months back and she told me the route. One of the turns was at a junction where there was a huge sign indicating that Lavale was to the right. I was not supposed to go right here but go straight to get to the college I wanted to go. She reminded me this particularly as we had made that mistake the last time and ended up being lost. But indeed at that junction I ended up going right and getting lost again. 

4. This was the night after my CAT exam in 2012. My centre was in Kochi and I was hanging out with my friend Roshan and it was about 2 in the night. We were both really happy as we thought the exam had gone really well (Roshan made it to IIMB so I guess his actually went well). I suddenly got the urge to go to my ancestral home which was about an hour’s drive from where we were. It was in a proper village and no one lived at that home anymore. So we took off in Roshan’s car towards my ancestral place. Now about this home there is a plot of land that belongs to someone else next to the road and beyond that is my ancestral home. You have walk through this plot of land to get to my place and there are no fences or boundary walls or anything. But when we got there, there was a long boundary wall right next to the road before the plot of land that I was supposed to cross to get to my place, there was no opening in the wall and you couldn’t even see my home from there. Being a village there were no streetlights and being the middle of the night there was nobody around who we could ask.  Unable to locate any way to get in, we left the place. Roshan to this day doesn’t believe that my ancestral home is there and thinks I took him to a random place. Then I said let us go to my family temple which was a couple of kilometers from there. To reach there we had to go through a maze of small village roads and again we got lost. We kept circling in the small roads, there was no Google maps or anything to help us and we were unable to find a way out. Finally we somehow made it to the main road and went straight back to Kochi for the fear of getting lost again.

These are not the only instances of me getting lost or losing things but these are the more absurd ones. So next time you ask me directions or give me something for safekeeping think twice before you do it.