Good Friday

I begin most of my weekends resolving to make every minute count. After all, like the motivation gurus tell me, this is the first day of the rest of my life. I had a long weekend in front of me and a whole bunch of ideas on how to spend it.

A couple of years ago, an India-Pakistan cricket match would have been a great reason to stay home all day. Who am I kidding, I could have stayed home to watch a kabbaddi match between Channagiri and Agumbe districts. I can’t tell when the change happened but the sports channels woo me no more.

I tried to interest myself in the book I’m reading just now, ‘The Story of San Michele’. Its a nice book, except when the author takes you into a Lord-Of-The-Rings kind of world infested with goblins and elves, and where the moon is a ghost. A world where no physical laws exist, and so the author can sell any crap. And this is an Autobiography for god’s sake. Even his real life experiences have characters that cheese me off. There is a bear for instance which attacks men but reserves it’s best behaviour for women. I’m guessing its scientific name is Ursus Chivalrous!

I thought of picking up the guitar, but the eco-friendly guy that I am, I didn’t have the heart to displace all those spiders that had built those beautiful cobwebs inside the box and between the strings. There were no arthropods in the harmonica so I played that for a while. As it happens with most things I try, my expectations from myself far exceed my talents, so I put the harmonica away in frustration.

As it turned out I just lay in front of the TV all day without venturing more than a couple of meters from where I woke up this morning. I don’t recollect watching any programmes, I just changed channels several million times. It was a day spent in completely shameful lethargy. I must be getting old, because I really liked it!

Rapture

The kestrel played with the wind. It rose hundreds of feet and swooped down hundreds, but during the half hour that I watched it not once did it flap its wings. Did it feel proud about its adroitness? Did it have Jonathan Livingstone's pretensions? Did it feel special about being able to survey the rain forests from so high above? Well, even without extending human traits to it, watching it ride the drafts, and hearing it's shrieks scattered in the wind, was trance-inducing. I remembered that scene from American Beauty in which the drug-peddling kid shoots the video of a feather dancing in the wind. I remembered the words too 'Sometimes there is so much beauty in the world that I feel I can't take it anymore'.

My Cousin Vicky

Vicky got married last week. And for a couple of weeks before that, my family had been in a frenzied shopping marathon. "Vicky gets married but once" my mom tried to justify. Poor argument! No, I don't doubt Vicky's fidelity, but it's stupid, I explained to her, to go ransacking malls everytime a cousin of mine gets married. It's like declaring a public holiday for every chinese guy who dies; because, thanks to virile, much-married granddads and their undying faith in the undivided hindu family, I have enough cousins to populate a medium sized Indian town. Among family trees mine is a sequioa!

As for me, I decide to exercise thrift. And I didn't feel out of place in my 114Rs Kurta, because the wedding was as unassuming as my costume. No priests, no shlokas, no rites! It shocked a few elders but it turned out to be a huge hit overall.

The second chapter, the reception party, was in Mumbai. It was great fun. After the party, we decided to hit the dance floors of Mumbai (ah! I always wanted to sound like a true-blue socialite!). My spartan dressing sense got me embarassed this time. We were thrown out of the first place that we went to because I was wearing "open footwear". I wanted to stand my ground and and deliver that classic line that I once heard from Nitesh, "These are not chappals, they're floaters", but the bouncer measured a couple of heads taller than me and talked like he had more testosterone than blood flowing in his plumbing. Besides, I wasn't getting too much support from my buddies, most of them had already disowned me. We eventually got into another place that tolerated the likes of me. There I ran out of my wide array of dance steps by the middle of the first song. I laboured through the rest of the song using an impromptu chimp-with-cerebral-palsy style of dancing. But very soon I got bored. I found myself a nice corner to sip my beer and watch the others make fools of themselves.

The next day was for sight-seeing, vagabonding and bowling. Check out this snap of the sunset at Juhu.

Sunset at Juhu
After this we visited the chaat places and indulged in the most vulgar spree of binge-eating ever! It was my favourite part of the trip :-)

It's funny...

...that every person I meet these days claims to have been a 'back-bencher' in college.

Almost everyone had a lecturer who said "Please open the windows and let the atmosphere/airforce/environment in" in class.

And every mother has a kid who stands first in class.

And every software engineer likes to trek.