Delhi Daredevil

WELCOME ABOARD! PLEAZE BE PATIENT AND WATCH COMPLETE FILLAM! AND PLEAZE TRY TO UNDER-I-STAND!

DEDICATED TO: FOOTPATH BABA, HIGH SHOWCIETY, LOW SO-SO SOCIETY

Starring:

Bus conductor(OmBir): The cantankerous young conductor sahib. Asks you for money for the ticket in a most disrespectful , rude accent . Hurls abuses at fellow passengers and demands them to make room for others. Gets down out of the moving bus occasionally to get panmasala and lure more passengers(read:victims). Thrashes a bunch of school-kids who try to sneak in from the back door, who are regulars at using public transport without bothering their pockets.

Superman Tau: Helps women passengers & elderly to fight for their reserved seats and voluntarily vacates his seat to give his seat to other fellow women passengers or an elderly person incase all the reserved seats are full.

Nand Kishore & Rameshwar: Best Fraands. Hold hand-in-hand(mocking Russel Peter). Nand is bald and Rameshwar has a thin moustache, both are in the prime of their youth and have a 0-figure like Kareena Kapoor. Nand and Rameshwar listen to their loud ringtones on their phone, much to the irritation of the superman chacha and shamelessly gaze at Neha, the lovely young lady.

Ravi & Jyoti(Romeo & Juliet): Love in the times of Hysteria. Holding hands like Nand Kishore & Rameshwar. Young love blossoming. Ravi plays a romantic ‘Kumar Sanu’number on his phone. One lead of the earphone in his ear and the other lead in her ear. How Romantic! They don’t give a (D for )Damn for (G for) Gotra! Meanwhile, irritated Bhayankar Chacha, a balding middle aged man with a protruding paunch (classic one-pack ab), overlooks mocking silently at this shameless generation, a tinge of anger and even jealousy reflected on his face.

Bhayankar Chacha : Nose digging, crotch scratching(A Kodak moment!) middle-aged uncle who is a little perturbed by R&J and also by his receding hairline. Finally, retires to sleep occasionally disturbed by jhatkas as Pilot Chaudhry drives the bus as if he is flying a plane(but no seat belts here).He dreams about R&J’s D for Dead Bodies due to G for Gotra.

Chotu: Enter Chotu. A tiny eight-year old. Problem Child. Outsmarts the conductor and travels dangerously on the footboard without OmBir noticing. For Free! (Lack of)’Size does matter’ for him. He wants to be rich, so that he can get drunk and drive a BMW and mow down many Chotus who sleep on footpaths.

Family time: Mr.Asif Ali is standing with his burqa clad wife Fatima(carrying a cute crying infant)and 5 children. Mr.Ali is scratching his long beard deep in contemplation as how to get his family down safely and which door to choose. Great Ghalib’s Urdu poetry running as marquee in his head (head covered with a skullcap): kab se hooN, kya bataaooN jahaan-e-KHaraab meiN ? Fatima is busy during the entire journey trying to make her baby quiet, as the baby fights humidity, noise and occasional jhatkas. Little do I know, Asif Ali lost his elder brother in Gujarat riots.

Mausi Srikala: Hurriedly asks fellow passenger(student) to give her the window seat. Sits at the window seat, pukes her heart out of the window of the bus. Poor lady couldn’t handle the congestion & heat. Sympathetic stares coupled with oh-poor-womenly gestures give attention to the women as the fellow passenger(the student) hands his water bottle(which refuses to helps).

Student Ram Prasad Agarwal: A studious, hard-working and decent IQ kid aged around 16 coming back from IIT coaching. His grasp on concepts of high-school physics is impeccable but he is unsure of how to apply the laws of motion practically. He knows inertia would make his jump from the moving bus difficult( the wretched driver won’t stop the bus completely) so he times his jump, but still doesn’t attain perfection as compared to those ruffian, uneducated punks who’ve never heard of inertia but still have perfected the ‘art’ of jumping.

Irawati, Sheela, Janki: Middle aged women, dark-skinned, wearing light-coloured saris, kaleidoscopic bangles, small bindis, eyes wide open, brushing their hair with their hands chatting energetically about topics ranging from monster mom-in-laws to the monster mahangayi (to be precise: food inflation).

Zakir Hussain Jr: The poker faced teenager also selling chilled mineral water(Bislehri) in small plastic packets. Stands for the entire journey (after his sale) and plays percussion on the back of my seat with his filthy hands. Dhin! Tak! Tak!

Lovely Young Lady Neha: Educated, Independent(maybe), middle-class young woman, wearing T-shirt scribbled with some message(the humour imperctible to her fellow passengers)and jeans. Cursing her middleclass boyfriend of not picking her up from office that evening. Uses the Smart-Message-Service to smartly pester his boyfriend, who is busy pestering other girls.

Bihari Uncle Ji: Aged, senior citizen seated on a senior-citizen seat drenched in sweat and tears swelling out of weary eyes not because of his property tussle with his beloved son(men don’t cry) but because of pollution. Yes, even when people are strong enough to brush aside their worries and problems from public sight, salt-water still dares to trickle down their cheeks when the dust, the smoke and pollution( a breath of fresh carcinogenic air) prick their lachrymal glands and they surrender.

‘Dar ji: He sits there at the front end ,helps fellow passengers get off and advises a couple of anxious first-timer young lady passengers guiding them by answering the million-dollar question ‘where to get down? ‘ With his colorful turban, long beard(not longer than Mr.Ali), garish black shirt golden buttons and shiny golden letters inscribing ‘Singh is Kingg’ but above-all his disarming smile and a friendly Punjabi accent, he is much of a character. He prefers staying in his Delhi rather than flying to utopia(read: Canada).Little do I know, he lost his father to (pseudo)secular party workers in ‘84 Delhi riots following assassination of a prime minister. His father was burnt alive.

Miss. North East : Student of Delhi University settles comfortably alongside Neha. She is wearing tight jeans and an ‘Iron Maiden’ t-shirt. Plugs earphones in her ears to shut herself off from ‘chinky , ‘chowmein?’ like crappy taunts she hears(overhears) almost daily. She is mistaken(by some) for being Chinese or Japanese in her own country by her own people, the same ones crying about racism against Indians abroad. “You have small eyes, you ignorant shitheads if you can’t see north-eastern states on the map of India”, her inner angry voice says.

Mr.Salesman: An entertaining middle-aged man who sings cacophonically to market the products he’s trying to sell: a pen-cum-pencil, a colorful cloth fan, a torch and hair oil(small bottle). ‘Choose any one for Rs.10/- only’. Quality Guaranteed. Nobody’s complaining, as long as there is a little entertaining, commercial break from monotony. Perhaps, I needed all of those. A pen-cum-pencil to maybe write some permanent and some temporary parts of an anecdote respectively. A cloth fan to help me fight asphyxation. A torch to maybe put some light on the adventures & dangers of being an aam-aadmi/aurat. Hair Oil to maybe relieve myself of the ‘itch of the brain’. I was forced to decide against buying as my hand couldn’t reach my back pocket, where my wallet was busy chanting : Jeb katron se savdhan. As he walked past me, curious passengers checked out the products and a handful bought the stuff.

Pilot Trideveshwar Chaudhry: The driver, the captain of this noisy, overcrowded ship and the creator, preserver & destroyer(tridev) of the pandemonium. Thanks to his driving(read: flying) skills for the mind blowing, bone crunching, nerve wracking, adventurous, turbulent ride and for weaving through the traffic and making us reach our destinations as fast as possible(consumer satisfaction!) minus those freak stops at no-bus-stops to fill our already overflowing bus with more and more of victims(read: passengers). Has a motto: Traffic Rules Are Meant To Be Broken.

Background Music: Honking cars, two-wheelers & three-wheelers silenced by our bus’s filmi horn blare(Dhoom macha le), the massive bus engine belching, bus handles & cracked window panes of the bus rattling, irritating ring tones, ‘Hatt ja tau’ running in the bus stereo, coughing old man, vomiting poor lady, Uncle ji softly humming an old-Mohd Rafi song, cacophonic ad-jingles by Mr.Salesman, bullying conductor and passengers, noisy arguing women, talented percussionist Hussain Jr.

Even in this loud music a gentleman was able to concentrate on his magazine, I admired him. My admiration lasting only a second. He was actually browsing past photos of glamorous film actresses(Mallika Sherawat types).

Lighting: High beam headlights of cars and bikes(from the opposite side). Psychedelic green & blue lights inside the bus switched on during the night. Trance!

Graffiti(Art Direction): ‘Ladies Seat’(Women Reservation here atleast), ‘Senior Citizen seat’, ‘Viklaang(Handicapped) seat’, Ravi loves Jyoti(with a heart in b/w) scratched onto the back of a seat(immortally), ‘Hum Do Humaare Do’(Social responsibility talk uh?), ‘Pilot: Chaudhry’(a pilot in the true sense of the word), cockpit decorated with Salman Khan & Bhoomika Chawla posters, ‘Keep Distance Please’ written on the back of the bus(no such policy inside),

2 strategically placed stickers: Sehat Banaye Wazan Badain(Cheetan Clinic M 93100xxxxx)

Loose Wait! call: 90988xxxxx

Set: A worn-out CNG blueline delhi bus(405-A) manufactured by Tata.

Dialogues: In multiple accents essentially a deadly cocktail of Punjabi, Haryanvi, Bihari & U.P. accents, which make a dose of the Dilliwallah accent(as shown in Dibakar Banerjee films). Pure English & Shudh Hindi being raped unceremoniously. They don’t call it the rape capital for nothing!

Lyrics: Shameer. (By the way, Shameer will always be more ameer than Piyush Mishra)

Running Time: 85 mins (spl mention: traffic jams, roads dugup for CWG and savior pilot)

Certification: U/A (after beeping Ombir’s dialogues)

Budget: Rs.15/-

Genre: You Decide

In a Negative Appearance: Rahole Kool Who am I? You might think(if you can think) . I was a mere spectator of this grand show. I hopped onto the bus for a ride from Old Delhi Railway Station to Badarpur Border and I was a part of that adventure after a long hiatus. Architectural heterogeneities from high-rise buildings near ITO to slums near Sarai Kale Khan were not more amusing than the ethnic heterogeneities inside. Yes, I am a rich boy belonging to your MTV generation(I boast). I don’t believe in the racism of your kind but a different one. Don’t mess with me, I belong to the superior race. You need proof? Here it is: My underwear dangles out of my low-waist authentic Levy jeans bragging that I’m wearing the next best thing to naked. I’m sporting a black Che-Guavara tee (sure that Che was a rockstar. What ‘Cuba’? What ‘Guerilla warfare’? Are they also rockstars?).I also don’t know that Guerilla warfare was pioneered 300 years before Che by some punk whose name I read on Mumbai Intl Airport. My shoes & bag are branded (I boast again) too, the brand is a German brand with Bengali roots: Adi Das. I listen only to two popular rock bands & international pop groups. I’m unaware of the Vishwa Mohan Bhatts, L.Subramaniams ,Indian Ocean & other uncool people. Anyway, why should I bother? Their tees don’t sell in Palika Bazaar for 400 bucks! Got it! Little do you know, I’m a Kashmiri Pandit and my home was burnt in ’89 Kashmiri migration and they tried making me a refugee in my land. Human Rights groups, social actvisits & co were silent witnesses back then. My lips don’t lie my to-be-girlfriend wants to dance only like Shakira, not like Yamini Reddy(a famous Kuchipudi dancer) because I like to love Shakira more.

Anyway, as I jump clumsily from the bus I land safely, Nand & Rameshwar taunt me calling me a “fattu”(because of my amateurish jump). Finally I reach home, my family to me: ‘You look dead tired. You could’ve taken an auto-rickshaw. Just would’ve cost a little more bucks. How was your ride, anyway?’

I replied, ’Ummm… I’m making it into a movie. Main Sach kehti hoon,jhooth kahoon toh,kahoon toh marjaaoon!’

A Rahul Kaul Fil(la)m

Pun: Unintended (if at all you find it somewhere)