Brown coat, crowd traveller:

Tired of jogging in my University Campus, I decided to do my One and a half hour jogging outside Campus; my campus is decently large (about 256 acres). But I’ve exhausted its roads by regularly jogging on them for the last Three and a half years.

The idea hit me that by jogging outside campus I could get to know more places in my city, what’s more, I could look around and witness the bustling city and thereby get to know more places. What I thought would be a great run turned out to be a slow, calculated and risk filled walk. The roads here, as anywhere else in India is crowded and every road turns out to be a maze with everybody going in every possible direction.

I don’t think I’d be writing this post if I had my headphones on, one has to be alert in every possible sense. While I was navigating through the crowd, I noticed him. He looked smart and his eyes sparkled as he looked into the evening traffic, waiting to cross. He had a brown coat and he was panting, like he had just returned from a wild adventure.

From what I observed, he looked like he knew the place well, whilst I was struggling to make it through the evening crowd, and very nearly avoiding a Biker who was oblivious to his erratic driving. I was totally lost by now, having walked quite far away from my University’s seemingly familiar gate. But I trudged along.

There is never a fear of getting lost as there are so many people in India that no place will ever appear empty; and most people are friendly enough to help you out. Suddenly I began thinking how nice it would be to sip a hot cup of tea instead of risking my life on the road; I was rudely interrupted by a plethora of horns coming from the young evening crowd; one of the sound sources was a Bus that appeared to be controlled by two persons; one of course, the Driver and the other was the conductor who was madly waving his hands to other motorists to indicate that the behemoth of a bus wants to turn left.

Among the entire racket, I searched for him, the brown coat guy. He was now walking ahead of me, but more briskly as he darted into the crowd. I decided to follow his footsteps like a car following an ambulance in an emergency.

I was happy to see that I was making progress and very nearly jogging, finally! He was now approaching an intersection, but I was lost in my own thought and also busy in following the small space created by him as he swam through what seemed like millions of people.

Suddenly, he stopped. I didn’t.

I wouldn’t say I ran into him; I merely stepped on his foot. Fearing a hue, I readied to embrace an uproar. But he merely looked at me innocently and without a ruckus he waved his tail, barked at me and ran off, maybe in the search of another adventure.