Mumbai Xpress to Baba

Warning : This is not a movie review nor does it have anything to so with cine actors!

For those who are not aware, my work for the past ten months is on Indian Language Computing. We (moi team) develop tools to facilitate computing in Indic languages with primary focus on Telugu. There are many such teams all over the world that are working to provide computing support for their language and all are bound by the common passion... Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).

Indic Developers Meet
A meet of the FLOSS developers from India was held at the Homi Baba Center for Scientific Education (HBCSE), Mumbai from the 12th to 15th September. A couple of my team mates and I were scheduled to attend the conference to share our experience and learn from the experiences of others.

The Journey
My organization was sponsoring our travel expenses and so gave us our train tickets for the journey. We were scheduled to leave Hyderabad on Sunday 11th afternoon to reach Mumbai the next day. But things did not go as it was planned. To cut the long story short, let me just say there was a lot of miscommunication and as a result we missed our train to Mumbai. This despite the fact that we reached the railway station more than an hour before the time of departure! But what's the point being early if the train is not gonna stop in that station!!!

We later managed to get a partial refund of our tickets and booked a "Volvo Semi-sleeper A/C" bus to Mumbai leaving that evening. It's not the same as a A/C Sleeper in a Train but we did not complain too much... well not until we saw our seats!

While booking our tickets the agent listed all the features of the bus... "Its Volvo saar... semi-sleeper with A/C saar... this is the bus saar (pointing to a picture of the bus; like we give a damn of how it looks from the outside)". But at the end he added something like a fine print "Its the last row saar". Hey, as long as the bus has all the features you (the agent) say it has then last row will not be an issue, we felt. It was only when we saw our seats we realized that we were cheated. It was a Volvo-Semi-sleeper-A/C bus alright, all of it but for our seats. The seats lacked almost everything that the others had, no leg rest, very little push back and little leg space. On picking up an argument with the agent, we were told that it is "common knowledge" that last row seats are always like so. When things looked like it will not calm down he offered a Rs.50 refund per ticket and we felt we have had enough for one day and called things off.

The Meet
The 4-day meet saw a confluence of minds. People from Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Oriya, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi and Telugu (represented by my team) localization teams were there. There was also a team for Nepal representing Nepali language. The entire group was a mixture of students (one or two), free software enthusiasts and professionals from TCS, IBM, Redhat, Novell, CDAC, HBCSE, Sarai-IndLinux and so on.

Full-size with names

I think I will skip the technical details in this blog but I must say it was a wonderful experience to share knowledge with some ``freaks''. The only sad point was that the meet extended well past 8pm every day and since we were quite far from the central Mumbai, we did not get an opportunity to go for ''site-seeing''. Still we managed to go out one day, about seven of us went to a restaurant-cum-bar close by and while everyone had beer I settled for a Sprite!
Hey.. Free Software is more about philosophy and so is my abstinence, I argued.

I must definitely compliment the facilities at HBCSE. Good accommodation, great food and wonderful facilities made us feel at home. We concluded the meet with a roadmap for the future.

It was time to say good-bye and after all the formalities we made sure we were at the right place (read railway station) at the right time.

Mumbai Trains
I have heard before about the sub-urban trains in Mumbai but seeing is believing, trust me. I boarded a sub-urban train form HBCSE to Mumbai Coastal. The train was packed but nothing new for a guy who has been in tighter spots (read Chennai city busses). It was only when the train stopped at one of its major stop that warning about these trains flashed before me. People around me warned that the crowds would literally carry you in or our of the train and that's what happened. When the train was about to stop (but still moving though) one could hear screams of tens of people. The screams grew louder as the trains speed dropped slowly like a omen foretelling what is to come. And all of a sudden the entire crowd started moving out of the train like water exiting fire-man's hose. They had to. The train stopped only for a few seconds and more than half of the train's passengers had to exit. I was happy that this was not my stop; it would have been very difficult especially with all the luggage.

Home Sweet Home
Though I miss Mumbai a lot, I am happy to be back in Hyderabad. A lot of work that was started or discussed in the meet now must be completed. With renewed enthusiasm I begin my work here.. but not before writing me blog ;-)