Thursday Nights / Blogging Nights

It would be very ungrateful of me if I start this not by thanking a certain Mr. Waseem Munawar Khan. Waseem is the first official follower to my blog, and thankfully not the only one. I have two more followers, and yes, both of them are very pretty women. But don’t doubt their intentions, they are here just keeping a watchful eye on me. One is my wife and the other is my sister.

Waseem is an old friend. And by old, I meant that not in terms of his age, but in terms of the span of our friendship. I have known him since 1998, when we both were working for Gammon India on the Sion and Kurla Flyover Bridges Project. Waseem toiled hard at the casting yard located some 20kms away to make accurate concrete ‘I’ girders for this peculiar pre-cast segmental bridge, which some boys on the site managed to erect in all the possible wrong directions.

Sion Flyover was my second Bridge project. The first time I visited this project site, I wondered if we could ever build a 750m long road-over-road Bridge there. With thousands of vehicles plying every minute; subways; cables running across buildings and crossing over; all sorts of utilities running underneath, of which no one (including the public works department) had any clue; old buildings butting right at the edge of the carriageway giving absolutely no leeway what so ever to park your equipment, this flyover seemed one of the most difficult things ever to build. But then we were young, and we knocked off the 17month challenge in just 12, albeit mostly through brute force than with any technical excellence. Anyways, the company got a hefty bonus from the client and made huge profits. The boys learnt how not to build a bridge (the hard way). The commuters had a wonderfully smooth flyover to drive on (only till the first monsoon). And some very unlucky residents now had a pier in their garden or a bridge deck in their balcony.

Many years later during one of my nostalgic phases, I googled for ‘Sion Flyover’ and got a wikimapia link, which took me to an interactive map giving an aerial view of this bridge. I just loved hovering over it, getting a bird’s eye view of the favourite bridge project I worked on. However, my heart broke when I read the title, which read ‘Worst Flyover Ever Made – Sion Flyover (Greater Mumbai/Bombay)’. And why shouldn’t it? As a young Engineer, I slogged real hard to make this structure into a reality and gave it everything I possibly could. While I kept hustling between the Design Consultant’s Office in Navi Mumbai to the Client’s Office in South Mumbai helping them decide where to put the next foundation and negotiating traffic diversions with the authorities, some of my friends on site toiled hard on those miniscule construction spaces provided, digging manually to find that one spot clear of utilities to fit in a foundation. Later on, we worked with breakneck speed to erect those heavy steel and concrete structures within the two hours period (when traffic was fairly lull) after midnight, every night. We worked hard and partied harder. Both made possible by a very generous Project Manager who, on one hand overburdened us with backbreaking work (even on Sundays) and on the other allowed us to splurge company money to our ‘whatever’ content. I remember getting petty cash vouchers reimbursed for watching movies, having food at elite restaurants, guzzling loads of beer at Mondy’s / Garage Pub, playing pool, browsing internet and yes, celebrating late nights along with the dancing girls in those myriad dancing bars spread across Mumbai, all under the heading of ‘Client’s Entertainment’.

As I write this, I close my eyes and travel back to that construction site, some 12years back and I see a bunch of enthusiastic haggard, sweaty boys toiling, working hard, playing harder, unaware of the negative aesthetic impact this structure was to make on their city. While we worked like dogs and revelled like spoilt princes, we forgot that we were being used like machines to make a product, of whose real value and social impact we were intrinsically unaware of at that age. Day in day out the boys were fed with a military like decree to achieve timelines set by a very naïve Planning Engineer (that’s me) and pushed into brute slogging to sustain the management’s animalistic appetite to finish each tasks ahead of schedule, close it and get a reward. And of course this came at a cost, which was made up bartering against quality and at times worksite safety.

At the end of the project, most of the boys including me got rewarded by a promotion and better pay, but what did my city get? The answer: An atrociously disfigured and awful looking scar. If you took a walk under the bridge’s obligatory spans, commencing from the Central Labour Institute towards Sion Hospital, occasionally looking upwards on the underside of the bridge deck, you’d not miss noticing its lament blotched by the scars left from those numerous badly finished construction joints and repair works undertaken to accommodate the omissions. The dirge is as much about rampant corruption as much as it is about bad workmanship and the prosaic design. It is sad, but well, that’s the way things work in my country!

Sion Flyover is the place where I actually took my first real lessons on Civil Engineering and Construction Management. It is also one of those places, where I made many friends for life; one of whom is Waseem. As time went by, most of the boys moved on and some rose to high levels of management in their respective companies. I too moved on, and on my journey ultimately landed up in my current position working for Halcrow who are the Design and Supervision Consultants to the Lusail Development Project in Doha, Qatar. Two weeks back I got a pleasant surprise when I met Waseem again after so many years. He had just landed Doha to join Parsons, who are the Project Management Consultants to this project that I work on. The construction world is surely small and round. Only the other day, I was talking to Sachin Ghule who works for the Qatari Diar, our Client to find out that he worked on the Pune-Satara Road Project for HCC, where I worked in the Project Monitoring Cell. Instantly we were reminiscing about the good old tough times, which some very few lucky boys like me and Sachin and Waseem have experienced while working long hours at those many construction sites spread across remote locations in India and the delectably savoury food served at the Engineer’s Mess at HCC Sites, which no other company has so far never matched.

Finding an old friend is so invigorating and enriching. So much that this epitome of inertia (I, me myself), who used to hit the bed immediately on reaching home, now finds enough time and energy to take his old friend around this new city smoothening his acclimatisation. And that is exactly why I want to thank Waseem. Firstly, for giving hope that my forthcoming days, both at work and otherwise would be worthwhile and secondly, for giving me a valuable tip to ensure the longevity of my blog writing stint. So taking his advice, I have decided to have a fixed time and day for my blog writing. I have decided, come what may, I will write a blog every Thursday night.

So, thank you Waseem, for giving me my newest mantra – ‘Thursday Nights are Blogging Nights’