Part II - Departure

11:42
I wake up because my neck hurts. I look out the window and see a featureless stretch of dull grey farmland with scattered clumps of bald trees - almost exactly what I saw three hours ago before falling asleep. So either the train hadn’t moved at all the whole time I was sleeping or I was still in the great American Mid-Western countryside - 9.71 x 10^24 sq miles of the basic land template laid down by God when He was depressed and couldn't be bothered to add any features or details. Which was funny either way because the train was supposed to have reached the great city of Chicago by now… I can just hear their marketing campaign - “Choose Amtrak and every journey, everyday will be a complete surprise. After all, where’s the fun in knowing exactly when you’re going to reach your destination? Here’s what one of our customers had to say - “Hi, I’m Bob and I’ve been on this *beep* train for so *beep* long I can’t even remember where the *beep* I was going. But the snack bar is surprisingly well-priced!” Whatever. The Angel of Sloth wants me to come back to bed. Maybe the train being late isn’t such a bad thing at all…

It’s a cassette - the soundtrack for the movie Mission: Impossible II. I borrowed it from one of the “cool” guys in my gang - all my brother and I own are Backstreet Boys and Ricky Martin cassettes. It has been four years since I realized that the only way to defeat my Mother was to let her win. Three years since I took up the Junior level classical music exam because I knew it was the only way to put an end to it. She gave up on me when she saw what I scored on the exam… I still loved music though - I was ecstatic when there was this monumental explosion of high quality Indian pop-rock (Silk Route, Lucky Ali, KK) but tragically, it was killed off by a monumentally appalling explosion of vulgar remix music videos. Since then I’ve moved on to “western music” - pop, mainly but slowly starting to like Bon Jovi and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But the artists on the MI2 cassette are Limp Bizkit, Rob Zombie, The Pimps, Butthole Surfers - I am a noob but I can tell just by their names that they’re not like the Backstreet Boys. Their names are just so cool in a sinister, badass way, just like their music. And amongst them, there was one name that was decidedly more badass and sinister than the others…

14:55
I stand on the Metro station platform and wait anxiously. Finally, the voice on the other side of the phone tells me I will be alright as long as its a regular digital camera, but no sophisticated recording equipment will be allowed. My heart, which had frozen for the last few moments, decides to celebrate and revs up to Mach 2. My beloved Walkman phone has an awesome 2 Mega pixel camera which has consistently been, well, awesome, but it does not work in low light conditions. That's why there is a brand new Panasonic Lumix TZ-5 nestled safely in my sweatshirt pocket - 10x zoom, 9 Mega pixel and 28 mm wide angle Leica lens. When I say brand new, I mean I haven't used it at all after buying it during Thanksgiving - partly because my Walkman phone's camera is still my Number 1 but mostly because I wanted the Lumix to have a debut worthy of remembrance. Ooooh yes, this will indeed be a debut worthy of remembrance. My train is here - doors slide open and I walk in, thinking how apocalyptically cross I would be if something prevented me from completing this journey. As far as I'm concerned, this is the most important journey ever since that announcer yelled "Lift-off! Lift-off for the Saturn V rocket carrying the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the Moon!"

The basketball court of Siddaganga Institute of Technology is hosting an informal jamming session by the college band on a balmy April evening during the summer festival "Halcyon". I'm a first-year student, and I'm surrounded by seniors wearing black t-shirts with "Slayer" and "Anthrax" written on them. I've been the proud owner of a PC for seven months now but my music collection is still minuscule and does not include "Slayer" or "Anthrax". And I cannot recognize a single song the band is playing, but I'm not alone. Less than a third of the crowd is cheering and applauding for the band as the rest of the crowd is standing around looking clueless. Meanwhile, several thousand meters above us, rain clouds reach critical pressure and begin disintegrating into little drops of water which plummet toward the ground. The first few of them land and the seniors go into Defcon 3 - "Machas, give us a hand here". What looks like half of a tent is summoned from Heaven knows where and a ring of people (including me) hold the piece of canvas on top of the grateful band like an umbrella as they start playing a new song dedicated to the crowd - it sounds vaguely familiar. And as it starts pouring around us, nearly everyone starts singing along with the band to the slow, mellifluous number that's evading my memory. I ask a senior standing next to me what song it is. You have to permit some poetic license here, the most biblical clap of thunder rolls across the sky and the senior says "Metallica - Nothing else matters".