Shunting between Indore & Lucknow

Last 4 weeks have been pretty hectic for me. There were couple of marriages in my family @ Lucknow, separated by a week's duration. First was for my brother & second was for my brother-in-law. Needless to say, I couldn't afford to miss my brother's marriage and couldn't dare to miss my wife's brother's marriage :)

To complicate the matters further, both the marriages were accompanied by few ceremonies starting a couple of days prior to the D-days & lasting a couple of days afterwards. The total duration of ceremonies was spanning across a period of 3 weeks. To add even more spice to my problems, a couple of my brother-in-law's ceremonies were planned at Rae Bareli (nearly 80 kms from Lucknow).

That means that now there were 2 dimensions to my troubles - time & distance (you might feel as if you're reading about some problem from high school physics).

From time perspective I had two choices: first - take leaves for 3 weeks & enjoy; second - take leave on the days of ceremonies only & move back & forth between Indore & Lucknow. Of course, the former option was out of scope because I couldn't get leave for 3 weeks for even my own marriage; so I had to stick to the latter.

From distance perspective - Indore's train connectivity is very poor, so every time I had to go to Bhopal via taxi (200 kms) & then catch train to Lucknow, and then take bus route for Rae Bareli. In fact, during my last journey from Rae Bareli to Indore; I made use of almost all kinds of mechanical public transportation available. It included bus, taxi, train, cycle rickshaw, auto and city cab. Thankfully, none of my routes involved bullock carts!

My final itinerary had me shunting between Indore & Lucknow every 3-4 days. Typically if someone at Indore asks me "what are you doing this weekend?"; I reply "Nothing as such, just going to watch the upcoming movie"; but during last few weeks I would reply "Nothing as such, just going to Lucknow".