A little saved today is more spent tomorrow

Have you heard the cliché “penny wise pound foolish”? Its origin can be traced to our British colonial past (pound and penny) and its survival to our regard for conventional wisdom. However, you wouldn’t hear many people admit that they lived the aphorism. This week I did. Let me explain how. 

During my last five years in Bangalore, I have promised my parents many times that I would visit Calcutta twice a year, but it didn’t work out. This year I made up my mind to do it, once at the end and once in the middle of the year. April, being the fourth month of the year, felt somewhat close to the middle if not perfectly so. So I chose last week of April for my travel home.

My friend, who helps me buy tickets online since I don’t have a credit card (without grumbling), insisted I fly up and down. I said I would be economic and travel one leg of the journey by train. “Which one?” Because I would get tired while returning, the return journey seemed more appropriate for flight. So I bought a return-flight ticket from Calcutta to Bangalore.

But where I would get my train ticket to go to Calcutta from?

Flight tickets can be easy to get but not so with train tickets.

I approached a ticket agent and he promised me that while he wouldn’t be able to get me a regular ticket due to paucity of time, he would be able to arrange for a tatkal one, which is issued only a day or two before boarding. I said I wanted a ticket on 22^nd April, and he replied, “Done sir.”

Today, in the morning, he called me and said he hadn’t got a confirmed tatkal ticket; what he got was on waiting list behind eight people. Such tickets never translate into confirmed ones and you are booted out of the train unless you are lucky.

He asked me whether I would be interested to fly to Calcutta and I outrightly dismissed the idea and said I would visit his office later.

When I visited his office, I didn’t like the train options he told me. Then he scoured a website to show me flight options. I settled for the least-priced one, Rs. 6600. Earlier I had given him an advance for the train ticket; I paid him the remaining amount.

While returning home, I reflected if I had bought a flight ticket for going together with my return ticket, instead of trying to travel by train and be economic, I would be richer by a tidy sum.

Be that as it may, at least I am going home. (I am flying by Air India on Sunday morning, 24^th April.)


You can also call me an April fool.

Calcutta Diary

This December I went to Calcutta after one and half years. To avoid traffic, the cab driver chose a different route from the airport to go to my home. On the way I encountered the changes that have taken place in the city.


I saw IT complexes, some already made and others under construction. I also saw swanky malls; nowadays you find them everywhere in Calcutta. But as the cab went past Salt Lake – a place which was developed later and remains unlike the rest of the city – the optimistic mood sank. I met old buildings awaiting repair for years, narrow by-lanes, traffic gridlocks, dust and grime and a sea of people.

This part of Calcutta introduced me to another change. Unlike few years ago, when where ever you went you saw red Left posters, now you mostly see green buntings and hoardings of Trinomool Congress (the opponent of Left in West Bengal).

The driver informed me that a political procession was out clogging all important roads of the city, hence the traffic jam.

After reaching home, I read in the newspaper that the strike was called by the Left parties. I thought in other cities ruling parties rarely call strikes that disrupt the normal city life.

After a few days of my stay in Calcutta, my niece got engaged. On the engagement day, I met many family members and friends I had not met in a long time. There were discussions on various topics but the one that got me involved was politics. State assembly elections are nearing in Bengal and I wanted to guage public mood.

There were various views on the decline of Left government in Bengal and while everyone was disappointed with Left, no one seemed to offer an alternative. They seemed upset with the Left but not happy with the prospect of Trinamool coming to power. “So would a coalition of Congress and Trinamool with a Congress CM work?” I asked. Some agreed with me. (But I read later that Congress has a very weak presence in Bengal and many of its leaders are moving to Trinamool Congress.) Later regreted sounding too political.

One of my cousins, who was once a card-holding member of the Left, said in Karnataka people are happy and prosperous in cities while farmers in villages are committing suicide. “Farmers are committing suicide in Andhra Pradesh and not Karnataka,” I retorted. My cousin was a little surprised to see my sharp reaction.

Winter is a season of book fairs in Calcutta. The one held at Maidan is a grand affair visited by noted Bengali writers. Budhadeb Bhattacherjee, the CM who is known for his literary inclinations, visits the fair every year. This time at the fair he said the end of Left in Bengal could be the end of everything. It sounded like the last flickering of a dying lamp.

Few days after the political debate at my niece’s engagement, I tried to figure out why I reacted so sharply to my cousin’s comment about urban Karnataka being happy while the rural Karnataka suffers – and identified the source of my anger: Traditional Leftists have a way of discrediting others’ success to underplay their own failures. But for this reluctance to learn from others, Calcutta could be a different story today.

On my way back to the airport, I saw those IT complexes again and left the city with optimism.