Offsite blues

Green and verdant Punjab, where effective irrigation enriches land that's been described as a 'happy geographical accident' (5 rivers flow through the land) rolls by. But in this horror of a bus, there's not much time to appreciate that. The photo of the bus reveals benign interiors, but surely you know pictures can lie? During our journey one of its interior light panels fell off and as night approached the bus began to look like a seedy bar complete with yellow lighting, beer fumes, kebab smells and cigarette smoke.

Office offsites are supposed to help you slow down, consider your work and brainstorm. You're supposed to come up with bright ideas that will eventually help your company sell more ads at better rates. But I suspect our bosses had settled on slightly less ambitious goals - come back safely without killing each other, seems to have been the brief. And so it was that a motley bunch of political reporters, news features people, bureau reporters and cameramen began their journey from Delhi to a resort in the Shimla hills that nobody had heard of.

The music system in the bus - if it could be called that - was of stone age vintage. The kind that plays tapes with the volume fading up and down. Not that the selection on offer was exciting either. This should help you understand the kind of stuff we had to listen to, "Sab tho milake peethain hain, paani sharaab mein. Mein peegayaa jawani sharab mein." Anyway, our Sikkimese friend fiddled with the tape 'deck' and conjured up a servicable arrangement, consisting of a mic placed next to his Nokia phone on speaker mode. Thus were we treated to mono sound renditions of 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' (hah!) and other such classics.

The journey reminded me of Calvin & Hobbes and the trips Calvin's family takes for character-building. In the books its rainy and the fish aren't biting. Here the journey was uncomfortably long and nauseating. Several colleagues experienced catharsis in a plastic bag, if you know what I mean.

Koti resorts wouldn't set your pulses racing, but at least the rooms and toilets were clean, the water decently hot, the food strange but certainly not mouldy and the views excellent. We went on a really long, aimless walk that saw us shimmy up and down forested slopes and ended up on a golf course where we played cricket. (!!) Too tired to go back walking, some of us hailed a bus. Didn't know bus conductors could be courteous, but here apparently they are. That evening, the icing on the cake - the India-Australia Twenty20 semifinal in front of a bonfire.

What kind of people go on a three-day vacation and spend two of them travelling? I wouldn't want to explore that quesiton myself, simply because it could lead to disturbing conclusions about us, but no, the trip wasn't a dead loss. I got to know some of my colleagues, found out that the Patna correspondent really cannot function without three cell-phones and tasted single malt whiskey for the first time.

Too tired to attempt returning all the way by bus, we settled on the Shatabdi Express back to Delhi. It should have been a nice journey, with our sleepy heads nodding in unision to the rhythms of the train, but for some reason or the other some of us got into a version of the 'what ails India' discussion. The two loudest chaps were the pro-control leftist and the free-market liberal (that would be me) and I think we pretty much pissed people off in the train. While disembarking, a lady asked my colleague if we were wannabe journalists. It was that kind of trip.