Amar Dilli Darshan

The title of this article, which has been written in Bengali, means "My Seeing of Delhi", in the literal sense of the phrase. Actually this was not the first time I came to Delhi. I came here three times earlier, among them two visits were nothing but a sojourn to my journey to Faridabad. But last time, 3-4 months ago I came here for a meeting in the MOEF. None of these visits could be used for any kind of sightseeing or knowing Delhi properly.

So when I was asked to visit Delhi for an official work from 6th to 10th Dec, I was kind of elated that this would probably be the occasion for knowing the city of delhi properly. I came to Delhi on Sunday, 5th of December 2010 for the purpose of calibrating one infra-red pyrometer which is used in our Hydrogen Generation Unit for measuring the reformer tube skin temperatures. The calibration was scheduled to be conducted at National Physical Laboratory (an umbrella organization working under Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), Govt of India).

As per schedule I boarded a Jet Airways flight on 5th of Dec '10 which was scheduled to depart from Lokpriyo Gopinath Bardoloi Airport at 2:30 PM. But before boarding the flight, I had to undergo some tense moments. I was over optimistic in my time calculations and did not keep enough cushion while coming to Guwahati Airport. Anyway, I was just able to reach Airport at 10 minutes to 2 PM. But at the airport gate there was a big queue for entry to inside premises. This was the most rush hour of the day and on an average 1800 passengers per hour are plying during this time, so it is no wonder that there would be a big rush during this time of the day. Anyway, I finally got the entree to the airport premises at around 2:05 PM. Another five minutes were wasted for baggage x-ray and check-in.

When I finally stood in queue for the security check, it was 2:10 PM (remember my flight was scheduled to depart at 2:30 PM and boarding has already started). Again there was a long serpentine queue of passengers before the security check gate. Now I started to get some palpitation. I was frenetically looking for a Jet Airways crew who can help bypass the serpentine queue and get past the security check. But unfortunately there was none, though some crews of spicejet were doing the same thing to their passengers which I was craving Jet Airways to do. Anyway I had a hope (though not sure) that since I was given a boarding pass, they will not fly leaving me behind.

Finally, after complying with all the formalities, I boarded the airplane. It was 2:30 PM exactly when I was finally onboard. Anyway, I thought all is well that ends well. I could make it after all, and there was no time loss in waiting at the airport. May be it shows my great time management skill!!

to be continued...

A hectic day ending in revelry and carousal

The day started with a bit of lethargy. I woke up at exactly 8:10 in the morning. Of course I did set the alarm, in fact I set three alarms at 6:30, 6:45 and 7:00 AM, but stopped all of them and slept again. Then when I finally woke up at 8:10, I hardly had any time to reach office without being marked late. So I though what the heck! If reaching office at 8:11AM and 9:00 AM means the same then I would better go to office after doing all my morning chores properly.

So finally I reached office at 9:15 AM. After that my whole day was dedicated getting issued one cheque and placing one Purchase Order. Both were for a govt agency who is supposed to do calibration of an infra-red pyrometer. The pyrometer is used for measuring the skin temperature of the tubes of HGU reformer. Of late the instrument is showing erratic reading and we suspect it to be dysfunctional. Since the operation of reformer depends a lot on the correct prediction of the tube metal temperature, it became imperative to get the calibration done at the earliest. With this in view we had been trying to contact a lot of agencies for the last one month or so, and finally it was decided to carry out the job at National Physical Laboratory, Delhi.

This was all about the hectic part. Now coming to the carousal part, we decided that today we would not take our normal canteen food during lunch as this is very stale and unsavory. And today being thursday the food would actually be a torture on our palates. So three of us went to a nearby restaurant. We ordered beers and vodkas (vodka for me). With drinks we also ordered masala papad and pepper chicken (or something like that, I don't remember the name actually). Two large pegs of smirnoff was good enough to propel me to a state of intoxication and bliss. We wanted to take more... but time was of constraint. We also had to attend the daily RBO meeting (Refinery Business Optimisation, don't know if we could do any optimisation of the refinery business, but we surely did peter out all our energy and enthusiam in this meeting) at 2 PM.

After drinks we ordered three chicken biriyanis. The waiter said that two biriyanis would be more that enough for two people, but we insisted that we would take three. In fact one of us commented that he feels three would not be sufficient for us. But when the biriyani was actually served we found that the waiter was right. In fact the food was more than sufficient for feeding at least five people. Anyway we ate whatever we could eat, rest we had to throw away.

Then again in the afternoon (of course after RBO) our boss, who did not join us at noon proposed that we go to some bar and have some drinks. We saw that he was really eager for the party. So we had to join him again. Again we went to a bar-cum-restaurant in the city and there we had drinks and snacks. I had one and half bottle of carlsberg beer. The drink made me a little dizzy but there was absolutely no problem to come back home by riding my pulsar.

After that my girlfriend told me to write all this in a blog. I thought why not, this would also help me hone my writing skill. So that's how I am writing this blog. Thanks for reading it!