Mumbai to Ahmedabad....

I caught the train. Seat number 43. It’s a SL class upper berth. Alas not a window seat. I saw some white guy sleeping on the upper berth opposite mine. I could see him only from back. He may be a foreigner or suffering from Leukoderma, the later being non contagious. I don’t know why, I looked at him many times….I was acting strange. Normally I do such things only for chicks and I hoped I wasn’t turning gay.

Then I went to my upper berth exactly opposite to his (seat no. 46) and you guessed it wrong… I went to sleep. I remember some excerpts of my dreams including being April fooled (it was 1st April) in all ways and doing Salsa with the guy sleeping opposite me. I got calls from guys and girls who were either tricked or not by my April fool messages. (7 out of 11 got tricked... not bad ...No?). I couldn’t sleep anymore since I am not the master of my own bladder. The guy opposite me was not there anymore. I looked down and saw him… he was a foreign body reading something. Then I went to empty myself and came back and sat next to him.

I was reading “life after death” by Deepak Chopra (no relation to Aditya Chopra) and was reading “The Tibetan way of living and dying” (not on Chinese government). Damn, his book was thicker than mine. After 2 minutes, 9 seconds and 87 milliseconds of reading, he saw my book and smiled.

He said (for the first time to me) “I am reading a book on a similar theme.”
I said “I know I saw yours.” And to myself ‘since I am Indian’.
He asked if I have read the book he was reading. I said I hadn’t.
I asked him has he read any other book on similar theme. He said he had read “Many Masters Many Lives”. I said I have read that one too. Then I told him that I was curious to know about the different planes of afterlife mentioned in “Many Masters Many Lives” and so I was reading “Life after Death”. I also told him about another book on similar theme “Coming Back” and the similarities in the concept of all the three. He gave his point on his book and that added to four books from four different (great) people from different background stating unscientific stuff which showed consistency to a great extent. I mentioned him that “It was like the people were stating the SIDE VIEW, TOP VIEW and FRONT VIEW and if we combine them, it is possible to get an ISOMETRIC VIEW.”

He seemed impressed by my analysis. I asked his name. Handshake: Cory Goldberg…. Dhaval Trivedi. “Are you Raven’s Bother by any chance?” I thought. Thank god I didn’t ask….

(BACKGROUND MUSIC: “Chai chai chai bolo chai chai. Chai chai chai bolo chai chai Chai chai chai bolo.”)
He asked for a tea. He asked if I would like to have. I said yes. I put my hands in the pocket. He said “no… let me pay…”

Then while I was sipping tea (without noise to save India), I asked him if he is a tourist. He said he wasn’t… and he worked in India in bollywood and also as a photographer in elite marriages and he was on the way to some palace in Jaipur where he was going as a photographer of a marriage. Now when the word bollywood came, my eyes opened wide and I told him how big a movie buff I am. I asked him which films he has worked in? the ones I remember he said were ‘VEER’, ‘MY NAME IS KHAN’, ‘GUZAARISH’(yet to release), ‘CROOKED’(yet to release), ‘KANK’, Advertisement of ‘incredible India’, etc. he had recently shot a scene for CROOKED with “Abhishek” in a car. He shouted at “Shahruck” in MNIK and was killed by Some Indian in VEER.

He said he wasn’t interested in Bollywood at all and he was doing it just for money. But he liked India. He had done his graduation in photography and was interested in it so he found some jobs in that area too but bollywood payments are more and regular so I worked for movies.

He said that there is a dearth of foreign extras and wherever he went he would meet with the same foreign extras and it was easy for them to find work here… infact no need to find …. The work finds them…

He also pointed out that crores of Rs is wasted in any of the films at large. He gave an example that for KANK, He and about 10 of his fellow mates were trained for acting to play musical instruments for 15 days and at the end of the day it was scrapped and idea was dropped. Sets are made extensively and only a part of it is used and also sometimes the whole of it is wasted if it is cut down in editing.

He pointed out a recent shoot of ‘Guzaarish’ in which ‘Sanjay Leela Bhansali’ shouted and panicked for hours to fix a background full of candle which wasn’t even fully going to come on camera but to get the feel. He referred to SLB as a person who is mentally unstable or acts so. I have seen ‘Sawariya’ and so I couldn’t agree more.

We talked for hours... I told him about myself… I joked him that may be he was an Indian in the previous birth and so he feels so attached to India and wants to stay here in spite of a bad job, poor roads, family away, etc.

He said ‘YES I KNOW THAT’ seriously.
I was stunned.

The station came. I had to get down. I didn’t want to. But, I had to.
May be I had some relation with him in my previous birth. Seriously.