The Challenge

I woke up on Saturday morning to find out that there was a ticket to the second day second show of Enthiran. The movie unexpectedly turned out to be pretty good. The theatre was about 45 min from my place and considering the traffic on mount road n all, I was looking at an easy 1 hour drive. But I was not really worried about it. I love driving! So there I was, returning home after the show, and you know my driving skills, when I was challenged.

I wouldn’t have crossed a few of blocks from the theatre when a couple of guys driving a bike stopped right next to me in a traffic signal, right behind a huge truck. The signal turned green but without the truck moving, neither of us could move. I, not usually a patient driver, sneaked through the side making the car coming in the side brake and honk like crazy, but hey, I was gone by then. But I guess this impressed the guys.

I saw them watching me while I cruised through the continuous vehicles with speed and smartness and in the next signal, they again stopped right next to me. Though I was doing my best to ignore them, it was hard to do so when a couple of smart looking guys standing next to you are staring at you. So I looked back to see what the hell were they starting at (hoping it wasn’t me).

The green signal turned on and the cars in front of us rolled, and the guy in front gave me a look that screamed out “Go on, let’s see who is better!” Right then, I heard Ross Geller’s voice saying “Challenge extended.” and I accelerated, overtaking the car and them, which I think they heard in Ross Geller’s voice as “Challenge accepted.”

So there we were, driving in and out, overtaking as many vehicles as possible like crazy people all through the Mount Road, both of us enjoying the little competition, when it suddenly struck me that these guys were total strangers and I was almost nearing my place and I definitely didn’t want them to stalk me forever! So then I tried to slow down and let them go ahead, but they just wouldn’t! They slowed down too, and in the middle of the road with vehicles at high speed right behind them, they both (including the guy driving) started turning their heads and searching for me. It was so creepy (but in a weird sort of way, flattering too :P).

So after some time of this hide-n-seek of me slowing and hiding and them slowing down and seeking me out and me eventually catching up with them, I found a perfect way to outsmart them. As I was nearing Kathipara flyover, I slowed down and stuck to the right side so that I could climb the flyover. FYI, people who need to go towards the airport do not climb the flyover, they go left. So these guys, just a few vehicles ahead of me, turned back and saw me trying to climb the flyover and decided to extend their chase and took the flyover. When it was my turn, I took a sudden left (making the car behind honk like mad for which I was really sorry), and went down the flyover. These guys got a shock and applied sudden brakes, but they knew just as I knew, that the flyover was a one-way and it would take them more than 20-25 minutes to come back to the same place by when I would have safely gone. They knew they were outsmarted. So they started their engines, waved a goodbye, while I shook my head, laughed out at the ordeal and came back home!

What an adventure!

The Long Process

The worst time to run out of petrol in your two-wheeler, esp the one where the petrol tank inlet is below the seat, is in the morning, when there is a heavy downpour and when you are already late to work, when you are wearing multiple layers of rain proof clothing to protect your office laptop and your clothes so that you wouldn’t look wet, filthy and stupid in a monthly meeting with your superiors.

But when Murphy strikes with his world class law, there is simply nothing you can really do but brood and swear under your breath and well, fill petrol!

Now here is the process it goes through. While standing in the queue, first the helmet has to be opened and removed as the raincoat’s hood is stuck under it. Then the raincoat’s hood is untied, and the raincoat is unzipped and removed. Then the bag is removed, unzipped and the purse, which is placed inside a plastic cover (for water protection in case there is leak into the bag), is taken out from the cover. To avoid the other contents and the bag itself from getting wet, they are again zipped and hung back on the shoulder, and the raincoat is worn again. Then you get up, open the seat, and fill in the petrol, by when the wet helmet slips at least thrice.

You pay the guy, move forward, close the lid of the tank and the seat, and again the raincoat is unzipped and removed. The bag is removed, unzipped and the purse is placed back into the plastic cover and safely tugged in, then the bag is zipped back and hung on the shoulder, the raincoat is worn again, zipped, the rain coat hood is worn in the head and tied tightly, then the helmet (finally) is placed back on the head and finally, you get to sit back and drive away!

Phew!

Yelagiri Part II

Do you know that climbing down hill is exponentially more difficult than climbing up? Yeah.. we had heard about it too, but got to experience it in Yelagiri.

At least on our up-way, we were able to control out movements and the thorny bushes. While climbing down, the thorns were as much of a problem as the gravity! And the place was becoming cloudy and dark so fast, and the guide kept taunting us by barking like a wolf or a bear now and then when She, the meek docile female, immediately clung on Her who in turn held to Her-Bf for her life. It was hilarious when the guide hid behind the rocks and I went a little ahead on the path. They followed me, trying to wrench their way out of some bushes, when the Guide jumped out of the rocks on them barking and freaked them all totally! She was nearly going to have a heart failure! :D We all reached the resort, laughing big time about it.

We were back just in time for dinner, all feeling so great about our achievement, and planned for a night safari in the jungles too. But sadly it started raining so heavily, that we could go, as the resort owners said that there would be too many poisonous snakes prowling and the forest was not exactly a neatly paved tar road with neon lights, and they were bound to be extremely slippery. So we didn’t really want a snake hanging on our framed-photos instead of flowers and just went back to our rooms and slept soundly.

The next morning was one big comedy. Before I go on with that, there is a side track you should know.

Yelagiri is the name of the entire mountain as such, which includes a number of villages (basically just a few houses put together) once every few kilometers. Our resort was in Athanavur, the biggest ‘town-with-an-ATM’, with a single road with about ten or so shops here and there, and the rest of the buildings were other resorts. So the previous day, we decided to go cycling in the mountain side in the early morning, in the cool breeze. Aaah, it all sounded so good… But trust me, BAD IDEA!

We had gone to one of the other resorts- Yathri Nivas, and booked three cycles for rent at 30 bucks/hour/cycle (She couldn’t ride, so we all took turns in taking her doubles). We picked up the cycles at 8 in the morning, with the idea of returning it by 9. Horrible planning!

It was awesome fun while riding downhill. The cycles were completely out of control, moving at like a 100 km/hr (or so it felt) and there were 2 hairpin bends too, where gravity overtook our breaks and even I started praying (funny, when science and rationality lets us down, the only thing anyone can do is call the ‘God’), but well, I could hear Her screaming out to Her-Bf with her hands and feet in the air, and Her-Bf too was helpless and in quite the same state.

We could come to a stop after half an hour of the downhill slide, our hands and feet and all wrong parts were all sour and we all wanted a break. We found this small rocky hill in the side, and decided to lock our cycles in the roadside and climb it. Later after a 45 min climb up and down, we kind of didn’t know which way to take to return, We couldn’t take the way we came coz It was too steep to climb on cycle, but a passerby told us that the other way would lead us to our resort after some 2-3 hours!

We decided to take the route we came and climbed. The cycles started rolling backwards, downhill even when we were putting in all our energy trying to peddle the other way! We got freaked, and decided to push it and hopefully reach the city within an hour. The sun was soaring up and we were barely prepared for such a scorching heat. We didn’t have a cover for the head, not a bottle of water. The place was completely desolated from any civilization and we were stuck, without as much as a tree to take shade, in the middle of nowhere, unable to climb the steep mountain roads, with or without the cycles. We found some rocks under some bushes in the side of a huge valley, and decided that we couldn’t take one step more, and sat down, waiting for someone to walk by to guide us.

So there we were sitting in the valley side not knowing what to do, when a shepherd, an old lady sympathized with us, took out her Nokia handset called the auto-stand in Athanavur, told them to get a tempo big enough to accommodate four people and three cycles and thanks to her, a tempo with an open back arrived to our rescue! We piled up the cycles, stood like politicians in the back of the tempo and in the scorching sun and three cycles tied in front of us and no place to hold to, we climbed the mountains thus! What a roller coaster!

We returned the cycles at around 12 noon, completely exhausted in the heat, went back to our resort, washed up, ate our lunch, played chess (and FYI, almost won) and finally, took back a cab to the station at 3pm. The return journey was pretty uneventful, in the train filled with bickering and bitching families and irritating mamas n mamis.

But as we returned home with sour legs and sun burnt hands and tanned faces, we were thinking… What a weekend!!

And yet again

There was an incident that made my close friends think that I am an extremely sensitive girlie creature, which I most certainly am not. It was even mentioned in my write up while leaving the campus. The incident left me so embarrassed that I never went anywhere near doing it again, until today.

For people who have no idea what I am talking about, there is this sweet romantic movie 'If Only', which I happened to watch in my third year. My roommate was lying fast asleep on the other side of the bed, while I was happily watching it in mine, with my head phones on. The rest of my friends were all sitting in the next room gossipping away.

The movie was no suspense, highly predictable and I could guess where it was going and the ending too, within the first few minutes. I got so engrossed into the panic and desperation of the hero and his romantic ideas and his way of showing how much the his girl meant to him and everything, that by the end, I myself fell in love with him!

With his last monologue I was already in tears; and when she asked "Aren't you coming?" and he replied "Of course I am" knowing what was going to happen, and him covering and protecting her and actually dying for her.. I was weeping by then, uncontrollably!

I hardly realized that my roommate had woken up and was blinking groggily asking what had happened, and even my wingies in had come from the next room inquiring as to why I was crying. When they all saw that I was crying over a dead romantic hero, omg! They burst out laughing so loudly, that it broke my 15 minutes trans and brought me back into the real world.

All this while it has gotten screened a number of times in HBO, in Star Movies n all and I never even turned to that channel. I was that embarrassed! In fact, I have had it in my comp for quite sometime now. So I took a bet against myself, and decided to watch it and check out how mature and realistic I have become.

And to my greatest shock, the final scene this time, left me weeping only for 5 minutes rather then the 15 last time. Sigh! Apparently I am still quite unrealistic! But now, may be I can bet again next time, and end up not crying at all; Or may be never ever attempt watching it again!! :p

Physics

After the movie ‘Daybreakers’, I still wasn’t sleepy, though it was 12.30 in the night. So I started watching an episode of Bones, the one that started with a devil burning on the table in a church n all. The episode went on with the usual cool gross stuff and a psychiatric ward full of weirdoes. I wasn’t sleepy even after the episode, but decided to close the laptop nevertheless and tried to shut my eyes and brains. The AC was making such a noise and it was pretty cold already, so I switched it off and lay down in the dark silence, trying my best to go into my very own Pandora, when I heard a sound. It was a small hissing-squeaking sort of a noise. I got up to check if there was some insect in the room, but found nothing. So I switched the light off and rolled on into the bed, when the noise started again. It was growing bigger and was not continuous. I kind of got a little freaked, with my mind considering all sorts of possibilities from squeaky rats to snakes and switched on the lights to give a thorough inspection of the room, with the door open in case I needed to run out (;P), and yet I still found nothing.

I switched everything off again and cuddled back into my sheets, but the hissing sound kept bothering me. I decided to ignore it, filter it out and stop my bloody imagination from running miles. A few minutes later, it struck me. The darn sound was coming neither from some cricket nor from a rat. It was simply from the water bottle’s cap that was squeezed too tight, and was generating air bubbles at the cap rim. Damn you physics!! I simply got up again, opened the cap a little and the sound just vanished, and I finally drowned into deep deep sleep. :)

The Beeper

Once again, its been a while since I had time and mood enough to blog. And yet again I am typing away while importing an obscenely huge ugly file into an analytics tool and waiting, waiting and waiting. This waiting seems to have become quite a habit these days, but all the funny incidents that I keep thinking of posting now and then get lost in huge numbers and scripts and other screw-ups.

Yeah! The past 10 days have been an utter screw-up of a lot of things, and then me getting bashed by seniors and managers, first politely and then not-so-politely for my stupid gimmicks. Even at home, parents these days are not as forgiving as they used to be!

Everyone keeps telling me to grow up, though I seriously can’t really relate me growing up as even a remotely possible solution to the existing problems! First of all, why should I grow up?!? And what fun do they all get in making? I live in my own goddamn world and do not intrude into theirs, nor do I try to change their world. Why do people keep trying to invade into mine? Oh well, I guess that’s the definition of ‘Mature Adults’.

Seniors in work keep telling me to take things seriously and attend all meetings and trainings and remind me that I am no more in College and I should learn to be a ‘Professional’ in a ‘Corporate world’.

Parents go a step further… No No.. One step each, and one + one here = three… so three steps further and have taken it as a primary mission in their lives to make me ‘a-marriage-material’ for which I somehow show a shockingly strong resistance, according to them.

Mom that day made me stand in front of the servant maid and her little girl and asked me to identify the different Dals (Kadala paruppu, thuvaram paruppu, ullutham paruppu, etc) and the different types of flour (kadala maavu, maida maavu, arisi maavu etc). The wicked Grandmom and gossipy Servant waited for my answers, which as everyone expected, were totally and completely wrong. I got embarrassed n irritated, Grandmom started laughing and as usual called up the relatives and narrated a hugely exaggerated version and mom was extremely psyched about my ignorance even at something so basic such as ingredients. From that moment, I just resolved openly that I would not set foot into the kitchen even if the rest of the house was on fire, and have been religiously sticking to it since then. The fact that I can cook pretty decently when the ingredients have been identified and given, doesn’t get a lot of credits, it seems.

Grand mom then asked: How are you going to cook for your entire family after you get married?

Me: Family? It would be me and some loser iyengar guy, who would be earning too, I suppose, so we’ll either order from outside or go out and eat! Convenient for both of us!

Beeeeeep. Wrong answers. Yes… Plural.

Grand-mom’s reply to my wrong answer no 1: After marriage, my family would not only be the guy, but his family too.

My response (Sarcastically): Shearr.. just like my current family would become his. So he can come n cook n serve my parents in my place, n I would do the same to his in his place.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Wrong answer again.

Grand-mom’s reply to my wrong answer no 2: ‘Order from outside or go out and eat’?? Really?? You are really proud that you are earning, aren’t you?

My response (Bewildered): Well, why shouldn’t I? I mean… I am not stealing money or doing anything illegally or immoral, for me to feel ashamed! I have money, so I can spend it the way I want! Now if I buy one pizza, after marriage I’ll probably order two, one for each.I won't mind that.. Honest!! What’s wrong in that?!?!

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeppppppppppppppp
And the beeper never stopped!!

Well, maybe, just may be, sitting in the office was a tad better than sitting at home with an irritatingly ultrasonic beeper going on every time I open my mouth!!

Good lord.. the import is done earlier than expected! Yeah well, I m sure I’ll get more of such ugly huge files in the near future, and hence more possible blogging time!! :)

Happy New Year

There is always a lot of excitement surrounding ‘the New Year’. Everyone wishing one another greetings and wishes, loads of offers, HOLIDAYS, special TV shows… It’s truly a great time. The one thing that really beats me is the usual (ridiculous) question that usually follows the wishes, “So, partying tonight? Big plans?”

Seriously people! Help me out here! One thing I don’t understand is what their very idea behind the question is. I mean what DO people do ‘specially’ on the New Year’s night that they don’t do in the other nights or in other parties that the party-buffs may attend, other than probably wish one another “HAPPY NEW YEAR”? I think the whole thing has become too hyped-up.

This weekend, being a 3 day weekend, one more question follows- “What plans for the 3 days?”

This question is even more maddening! I live in Chennai with parents, friends’ living with parents too, in places that are quite far from one another, sick bored of travelling. The only places that one can think of is eat-outs and restaurants where families/hungry-hostel-people would go, or spencers/city-center which has become a little too clichéd, or beaches (that are toooo far for the only few friends living in Chennai) or some local shopping places like in T-Nagar where we have already met a little too often and have nothing left to do there.

Well, honestly, I can’t seem to think of any other place(s) to generally go out here in Chennai, probably coz though this is my native, the main high-school and college days of mine n my friends weren’t spent here! Plus when living with friends in Bangalore or in Pilani, going out for fun or for time-pass or for food and entertainment and to avoid loneliness made sense. But now, being at home with a TV and more importantly, parents, meeting every weekend just to eat, or for time-pass when work is tight, or to avoid being lonely when you always have company doesn’t make any sense, especially when we all (friends) get to happily talk about every small detail of our lives all over the day through mails n chats.

This is why, the very question is sad bcoz it has no answer from my side! And yet, every known-unknown person walking past asks “Hey! Happy New Year! So what plans for the 3-day weekend? I m gonna Pondy with my gang with some bottles n glasses! What about you?” And I dumbly say “Uhh.. I don’t know. No plans yet/can’t think of places to go/don’t have a huge gang here/living with parents well… I might just have a quite weekend at home, I think. Happy New Year to you too!”

As I entered the house, my parents were right there, drowned deep into Sudha Raghunathan’s concert on TV; and I said to myself, “Here starts my New Year weekend.”
Oh yeah… Happy New Year you all!! Hope you guys have a great weekend and a great year ahead!!

Did I Scare Him?

Yesterday I went to a departmental store to get some domestic supplies for mom. My mom usually writes me a huge list, and since I really don’t know the difference between dals (thoram paruppu, kadala paruppu, ullutham paruppu etc all baffle me big time!), I usually handover the list of groceries to a helper in the store.

It is there that I saw Him… a cute guy with a cool French beard, picking up some snacks. I just looked at Him for a second, and He looked back, I picked up a few chocolates, and we both moved on in opposite directions. Then I went to choose soaps and my ‘private’ stuff. There was a mother and a teenage girl, arguing over which brand was better while mom was insisting her daughter to take Whisper. Gosh! Thank God my mom wasn’t this fussy in public over these issues! I would have to kill myself if I were in that girl’s position!

I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I didn’t notice Him coming to the same place, to get His soaps and creams. Yes… creams. I saw Him take a ‘fair-n-handsome’ cream while I was holding my ‘girl-thing’, and before I could put it away, He saw me too, and blushed like a little girl, with cheeks all pink. I thought He might need His privacy and walked away to another section.

After collecting a few other things, I stopped near the razors to pick up one, and had the misfortune of running into Him again there as He was choosing a Gillette! Dear Lord! He turned so red on the sight of me with a pink razor, that I thought His face, neck even ears were just going to burst out! I have always thought that blushing guys look cute, but this was weird!
Before I carry on, let me tell you guys about a habit of mine. In places where I cannot talk or rather choose not to say things or voice out my opinions, I usually say it all inside my head, for my personal satisfaction.

So there He was, turning beetroot red, not knowing how to react, when I, without giving as much of a second glance, walked off without any botheration, telling Him off inside my head, ”Dude! Quit blushing! All women use Whisper and most of them use a razor to remove hair from hands n legs!! Did u really think movie stars were born hairless?!? Seriously, GROW UP! Having a good French beard is not enough, dude! You should also learn to act relaxed and at ease in public in such situations!!”

Finally, when I was standing in the queue in one of the counters with my trolley full, He came and stood behind me with His basket. The moment He saw me, He quickly shifted to a counter farthest from mine. Was He frightened?!? It certainly appeared so! But why? For having seen me buying a Whisper and a razor or for having been caught taking a fair-n-handsome?!? Or… did I actually say those things out loud? Oh NO! I didn’t! No I was sure I didn’t!

Well, I really have no idea what I did to scare the hell out of Him. But it sure was fun watching Him scoop His change and run out of the store clutching the bag like he was clinging to his life!!