Homecoming

Days after days... Months after months... Nothing can beat that enthusiasm of Homecoming; especially when one lives far away from Home... :)

My saga of homecoming started during my B.Tech days in Burla. Though the town is just 160 Km away from my hometown Rourkela, still planning for homecoming every fortnight was more meticulous than the NASA space missions.. ;) :D As I was browsing through the archives of my photo library, I just happened to get across this image, which describes the magnitude of the excitement.

This is a snapshot of my mid-semester examination schedule when I was in the first year of college. The date-time stamp 8/11/2008, 1330 hrs is self-explanatory... :D

Even today my hostel roommates from the college days, still pull my leg, saying that I used to pack my bags as early as a couple of weeks before the actual homecoming day. During those days, I was so frequently traveling between home and college, that I used to carry a print-out of train-schedule at Rourkela station for my travel convenience. Traveling to home at the shortest notice with the cheapest price was the sole motto. The best thing was the adventure involved in coming home from college. Rather than taking a direct bus to reach home in 5 hours, I used to travel in all available modes to reach home just in time. 

The journey to home would start with a share auto from Burla town to Ainthapalli Chowk via NH-6. This first leg of my journey used to take 20 minutes and a nominal fare of Rs 10. At the fag end of the chowk, buses to Jharsuguda were readily available with a frequency of one bus every half an hour. I used to complete my next leg of journey in such a bus. The intermediate travel in a Bus to Jharsuguda used to cost me somewhere around Rs 35. In terms of time consumed, the bus journey took some 100 minutes. The bus would terminate at Jharsuguda Bus Stand. With a huge bag on my shoulders, my immediate priority was to find, what I still refer as "The Wormhole". It was actually a hole made in the wall which separates the bus stand from the railway station. In simple terms, a journey through "The Wormhole" would teleport me at a place near to the railway junction west cabin. From the railway cabin to the ticket counter, I used to rely on my feet & stamina for running  approximately half a kilometer. Any announcement of next incoming train was typically a boost up signal for my brain, to pump up the adrenaline necessary for sprinting with Usian Bolt speed to the ticket counter asap. Depending on the time of my arrival at the station, I used to calculate the arrival of the next train and purchase tickets accordingly. Though I always planned to board the Haridwar-Puri Kalinga Utkal Express at 3:15 pm, but boarding the Yashwantpur-Tata/Hatia Superfast at 2:50 pm, felt like an icing on the cake. The best part in boarding the super-fast train was that, it had a non-stop run at full throttle from Jharsuguda to Rourkela, covering the 103 Km last leg of my journey in just 70 mins. On the other hand, the usual slower Kalinga Utkal Express had 2 intermediate stops and covered the same distance in 100 mins. No matter which train I used to board, as the train crossed Rajgangpur, I used to call up my father to pick me up from the railway station. By 5:15 pm, mommy used to serve me the day's lunch, as she always knew I would definitely skip the lunch at hostel in sheer excitement. :D

However, nowadays the excitement seems lost. Perhaps the marathon journey of 1607 Km from Pune to Rourkela is taking its toll. Though, the journey to home is a tiring 27 hours long one, still, the adrenaline starts pumping once again as the train crosses the famous "Diamond Crossing" after Nagpur Jn.

As the train starts accelerating after the famous Diamond Crossing, the reading on the milestones painted on the electric poles besides the tracks would change from 835 to 1132; indicating that the train is running on the BNR (Bengal-Nagpur Route) of Indian Railways. From that moment onwards, I would start reverse counting the milestone readings, eagerly awaiting for the 414th Kilometer milestone which mark the platforms of Rourkela. As the train reaches Bilaspur, at 4:30 pm, I would call up mommy and tell her about my dinner menu. Around 7:45 pm, the train finally enters Odisha via Jharsuguda Jn. For the next hour I eagerly await the usual clickety-clack sound of the train to change its pitch to a metallic sound, indicating the crossing of the Brahmani rail bridge. At the instant the metallic sound dies away and the train start decelerating, I pull out my luggage from underneath the berth and wait near the gates. Slowly, the train crawls into the platform and thus my 27 hour long homecoming journey ends.

All these years, the mode of my homecoming has changed; from the adventure filled Burla to Rourkela journey to the monotonous Pune to Rourkela train journey. But the joy of booking tickets for homecoming and eagerly awaiting the journey date is an evergreen experience in itself... :)