EYECANDY*

EYECANDY* On the war front? No way. Me, a pacifist. Except for verbal assaults with my favorite "Bunch of Morons." Then why did I loiter around the 1965 built Vijayanta tanks on a sunny and sweaty afternoon in Lucknow? Good question. Before my memory fades, a coal-fired locomotive engine - imported or home-made? - pulls me. It definitely belongs to the pre-Atmanirbhar Bharat era. Then these.. What these? I mean the grandiose works of Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose and of course Raja Ravi Verma. Is it "Revi" given his Malabari roots? I hang around the well-lit foyer with bamboo kursis arranged nicely. I peep into the huge glass & wooden fronted darwaja with jazzy curtains obfuscating me from knowing what's inside that "music room." The curious cat in me purrs. I try to push the darwaja open in vain. Where am I? On the lips of the 4-lane Hardoi bypass. On the outskirts of the Nawabi Lucknow. Inside the huge campus of the *Indian Railways Institute of Transport Management (IRITM).* On a short visit to share my take on the evolution of the road sector particularly about freight movement with railway staff collated pan India. I start with Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden where the First Couple had "everything". Including the Forbidden Papayya.. Oops... Forbidden Apple. They needed no roads (pucca or otherwise) for Amazon or Flipkart to door deliver in that zamana. 120 minute long session with a 10 minutes tea break. What I end up with? Fuggedit. It's immaterial. All the taqawat of spending extra four hours inside a crungey Lucknow Superfast Express due to midway engine failure vanished in a jiffy after a detour of what my eyes got treated in the city of tunde kebab