New York

A bunch of us Indians decided to try and land an internship at Barclays Capital. For that, we had to take a test and if we passed it, we would proceed to the interview stage. Of course, Columbus being a financial backwater, the test was not to be conducted here. It had to be one of the big cities – Chicago, Pittsburgh or New York. Since we had exams in college close to the date of the test at Chicago (which we thought was the closest center), we decided to appear for it at New York. As always, driving was the most cost effective option and we decided to rent a car for the journey.

The party consisted of Avinash, Roneet and the narrator. Since we had to pick up the car at the airport (that was the only lot in town), and since Roneet was notorious for being late, we decided that Roneet was to stay at my place the night before we started. We were supposed to leave early in the morning to the airport by taxi. As always, Roneet got his priorities wrong and could not come to my place. In his priority list, clearing his email inbox was higher than starting on time. Since I had reserved the car online, and had told the rental company that I would pick it up by 8:00 am, I was afraid that they would not hold the car beyond that time. As it turned out, we did not get the car we wanted. We got a van.

Thanks to the Internet, we were successful in charting our entire course to NY and back, down to the last turn and exit. Unfortunately, we lost our way as soon as we got out of the airport, and then decided that we should stop for breakfast. Talk about déjà vu.

This was my first experience of driving in the USA, my first experience driving an automatic and the first time I was driving a van. It was very comfortable with a commanding view of the road. But it was a heavy vehicle and the performance was not something to look forward to. The van was cavernous and was built to carry eight people in comfort. The three of us had ample space to stretch our legs.

Having finished breakfast, we then relied on the age-old method of asking for directions to get us on to the correct interstate. In the US, once you get on to an interstate highway, you can pretty much relax until you get to the next big city when you have to look to get on the “ring road” to skirt the city to continue your journey. We just knew that we had to follow I-70 East until Harrisburg and then get onto another highway.

The countryside was a pleasant affair with lots of greenery, especially in Pennsylvania. The road took us through the Allegheny Mountains. Instead of going over them, the road goes through them. There are quite a few tunnels and driving through them is an eerie feeling. There were stretches with heavy fog where you could barely see twenty feet ahead. Some pit stops and wrong turns punctuated our journey.

I learnt more about Roneet during this trip. Roneet does not attend classes. He pays his bills during that time. He studies in the evenings, complaining that “Life sucks” - his favourite quote. In the rare event that he does attend classes, he sleeps because he would have spent the night trying to study the things that would have been simpler to understand had he attended the classes. Of course, now he was trying to study and sleep in the van. I have not seen a more confused person in my life.

We safely reached our destination – New Jersey – by 10:00 pm. However, we had not factored in the confusion that the “turnpikes” could cause to a novice driver like me. A turnpike is an elaborate web of roads that is at the junction of major highways. One usually pays a toll to use the turnpike, and one has to be extremely alert to take the correct exit so that you don’t repeat the entire procedure again. The New Jersey turnpike was extremely complicated. My problem was compounded by the fact that the signs were not adequate. We ended up being imprisoned in the turnpike system for close to an hour, entertaining ourselves by handing out dollars at the tollbooths as we passed through them again and again. We finally got off the turnpike, but promptly lost our way again. The New Jersey-New York road system is the most complicated I have ever seen. We then circled a stadium a few times before finding the road we were looking for. At that moment, I was ready to abandon the car and walk to the place. It was like being stuck in a Chakravyuha. But better sense prevailed and we pressed on.

We finally were able to get to our room a full two hours after reaching our destination. The reason for us choosing to lodge at New Jersey was the cost. New York was simply too expensive. Moreover, since our test was to be held the following evening, we had ample time to get to the test center in New York from New Jersey.

A good night’s sleep later, we got ready (of course after going through the pain of trying to remind Roneet of his priorities), had breakfast at a nearby diner, and got onto a bus for New York. Not taking the car was the wisest decision that we made. The public transport in this region is excellent. The twenty-minute trip from New Jersey to New York cost about six dollars a ticket. The absence of the hassle made it worth every penny.

Not driving anything, I was able to actually observe the pace and scale of the traffic in this place. It was breathtaking. A sliver of sea (or river – depends on which side you look at it from) separates Manhattan from New Jersey. To cross this water body, there are two tunnels. One is the Lincoln tunnel and the other is the Holland tunnel. We went through the Lincoln tunnel and it was a very strange experience. Going through a long tunnel at quite a high speed with lights flashing past me, it was like one of those science fiction movies where people zip past the stars. Emerging on the other side, the bus went straight to the bus terminal.

The bus terminal was unlike anything I had ever seen. For one, it was multi-storied. To add to the experience was the fact that I could not recognize the exact point when the road took off from the ground. The entire path to the terminal was an elaborate web of driveways that was so dense; I could not quite distinguish between the ground and what was above it. It is quite difficult to explain, but think of it as a situation where the boundary between the ground and what is above it becomes fuzzy; that there is no clear demarcation, that one can travel vertically with an ease that was not instinctive. I sympathize with you if you give up imagining on the strength of my description.

The next step was to locate our test center so that we could return to it in the evening. We knew that it was on the corner of Broadway and Fulton streets. So, from the bus terminal, we went straight below it into the metro station without seeing the light of day. Quite convenient I felt. We explained to the ticket clerk about our destination and she indicated that it would cost us two dollars each. We bought the tickets, swiped them to open the gates into the subterranean world, and waited for the train. Once we got on the train, we tried to identify the station where we had to get off using a map of the metro system that we had picked up at the ticketing counter. Of course, it was quite difficult to achieve that since there are no landmarks available in the subterranean world: Only a tunnel with lights.

Again, we trusted the age-old method of asking our fellow passengers as to where to get off. One thing I noticed during this exercise was that New Yorkers are not as polite as mid-westerners. They are a lot gruffer and give the impression that they do not have time for blithering idiots like us who could not figure out a simple metro system. But help us they did, and we got off at a station. On re-emerging at the surface, I suddenly had the impression that I was back in some Indian city. It was more colourful than any other American town I had seen. There were lots of people, and very few white ones at that. Most faces were either black or brown. I was surprised, as I had expected Manhattan to be a “white” place. We then asked for the corner of Broadway and Fulton, and were guided on our way by an assortment of faces with different colours and varied accents. On reaching the spot, we however could not find Barclays Capital. It was then that we discovered that we had overshot our target and arrived at Brooklyn and not Manhattan. What are the odds of two Broadways and two Fultons in the same city? It was amazing. So, we got back down to the underworld and took a train back to Manhattan, this time managing to get off at the correct stop.

The subway system is very efficient. It is quick and cheap and takes the commuter from one point to the other with a minimum of fuss. But I do hope that New York would maintain the trains and the stations better. Right now, they are a tad better than the Pahargunj gate of the New Delhi railway station. For those of you who have not seen the place I mentioned, well, you have not missed anything in life.

Rising out of the ground in Manhattan, I was struck by the fact that there was very little sunlight that succeeded in reaching the ground. This was because of the skyscrapers that Manhattan is famous for. Seeing skyscrapers on TV or on the movies is one thing, seeing them in real life is quite another. New York is a pain in the neck. Literally that is. I am sure orthopaedists in that city have a good business with tourists straining their necks trying to look up at the skyscrapers.

We found our way to the Barclays Capital building and having assured ourselves that it was indeed there, we set about exploring Manhattan. Avinash was visiting NYC for the second time and had some idea of the general location of the sights. We being business students, had to make the trip to Wall Street. Our first stop was the famous Bull near Wall Street. It was a tourist attraction in itself with lots of people waiting to be photographed next to (or on top of) the bull. We then headed to Wall Street.

Wall Street is a narrow alley, maybe a little wider than Avenue Road in Bangalore. Maybe the very tall buildings on either side gave the impression that the street was very narrow. The buildings on either side were huge. On the way, there were the buildings that housed the offices of America’s financial stars. Also was the building of the Cunard Line, the company that operated the Titanic. Wall Street is not even straight. It is crooked where one building or the other juts out into the street. Actually, the street is the gap that is left between the buildings. This was supposed to be a very old part of NYC.

We soon arrived at the most famous stock market in the world, the New York Stock Exchange. In the innocent days before 9/11, it seems one could actually go onto the trading floor without any problem. Now, one needed a trader’s pass to do that. The building was barricaded and guarded by policemen armed and armoured to the teeth. I asked one policeman close to the barricade whether I could step over to take a photograph. Very seriously and with a perfectly straight face, he told me “Sir, if you step over this barricade, I’d have to shoot you”. I did not join issue with him on that. I assumed I got that response because of my brown face. But I saw him saying that to a few white faces too.

We had lunch at a place that served food to our liking. Then we went in search of “The pit” – the site of the World Trade Center. It was quite close to Wall Street and we walked over to the place.

It is a huge pit. The pit too had been barricaded so that nobody went too close to it. But, there were observation areas from where people could have a good look at it. The barricades were turned into some sort of a permanent open-air exhibition of photographs, the subject of which was the WTC in previous years. Nearby were several hawkers selling an array of WTC memorabilia. Tragedies too can drive business.

I saw photographs that compared the height of the towers to the neighbouring ones. They must truly have been awe-inspiring. I felt sad that such buildings that testified to human skill were brought down by some misguided souls. Strangely, I did not feel for the people who died and the people they left behind. Maybe that was because the event was quite distant in my memory or maybe being an Indian, I was too hardened to such acts; acts that are everyday news back home.

It was time to head back to the Barclays Capital building to appear for the test. We showed up at the Barclays Capital building to see a long queue of hopefuls like us waiting to sign in at the security desk. After being photographed at the reception, we were taken up in batches to the fifteenth floor. I realized that this was the highest floor I had ever been in a building. The testing room was big with the whole of one side facing Manhattan. There was no “wall”, just glass. It was a fantastic sight.

We were two on each table, facing each other. The guy sitting opposite me was a Russian student in Stanford doing his PhD in economics. “Great” I thought. There goes any hope I had of making the cut. In fact, most of the applicants were from such pedigreed institutions such as Columbia, Harvard, New York University etc. It seemed that we were the only ones from a lowly state university. But then, one of our seniors had succeeded the previous year. So there was no reason for us not to feel optimistic.

The test itself was brutal. While I was floundering through it, the guy in front of me seemed to be sailing through. After each section, he would look up with a smile and say, “That was OK”. I could only say “Yes it was”.

After the test, we planned out our evening in New York. Since the last bus to New Jersey was quite late in the evening, we decided to look around Manhattan as much as we could. But first, we needed to have dinner. Having heard that Manhattan had quite good Indian restaurants, we were determined to sample one of them for dinner. Manhattan has no dearth of Indians. We waylaid a couple of them to ask for the best Indian restaurant in the neighbourhood. They were very friendly and willing to help out a few Desi people in need of directions.

We finally ended up at a place very close to The Pit. It was not strictly Indian as a Bangladeshi ran it, but the food was Indian. The young Bangladeshi at the counter was very happy on learning that Roneet too was a Bengali. This changed everything. We got extra good service with him allowing us to sample all the dishes in the buffet before ordering. Of course, he persuaded Roneet – his “Desi bhayya” as he referred him – to order some kind of a Bengali fish dish. Roneet was over the moon.

After a good dinner, we proceeded to explore Manhattan. We decided to go to the southern tip of Manhattan to see if we could catch a glimpse of the skyline. Walking through the dark city, it struck me as to how many old buildings there were. Most of these buildings were well lit, with small boards in front of them with their history and significance. I being a history buff, had to stop in front of each front of them to read and photograph. This infuriated my fellow travelers.
By the time we reached the sea front, it was totally dark. Not knowing what to do next, we soon came upon a pier jutting out into the water. The skyline had to be impressive from there. Moreover, there was a chance that there were boats to take us out into the water so that the skyline was visible.

However, it turned out to be a pier for the ferry service between Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey. But the scene from the end of the pier was quite good, with the Brooklyn Bridge visible in the distance. The Brooklyn skyline, though not as impressive as the Manhattan one, was quite good. While I was photographing these sights, a guard came up to us to make sure that we were not troublemakers. Having convinced himself that we were just tourists, he had some suggestions as to how we should get back to New Jersey using the ferry. But since our landing point was going to be quite far from our hotel, we decided against taking the ferry to New Jersey. The bus was again going to be the best means of transport.

The bus terminal was near the “happening” place of Manhattan. The place was full of theatres and bars and neon lights. When we walked up to the street from the subway, it was as if entire New York had descended upon the place. Most theatres had just ended a show and there were people pouring out into the street. This was also the first and only time that I have seen two men kissing each other. It was quite a shock to me, but New Yorkers did not seem to mind.
It was a Friday night and the whole city was preparing to party away the weekend. We went into a bar to soak in the atmosphere. Avinash and Roneet had something to drink while I looked around. There were a lot of people there who seemed to be intent on doing only one thing – having fun. There was very loud music playing and everybody seemed to be dancing. Scantily clad women and men gyrating to the music was quite “OK” with me in the sense that it did not seem out of place, and I was “in the place”. I cannot imagine something like that in Bangalore without feeling that it was inappropriate. Maybe I am prejudiced, but then, maybe that’s how it is. Some things are more appropriate for some places than others.

After that, we safely made our way back to our hotel in New Jersey for a well-deserved rest before starting back to Columbus the next morning.