Catch up

An internal survey among the members of the UVCE tronics gang revealed that there are more consumers of the water from the river Thames than of any other water body in the world. No, that was a lie, but my point here is that the UVCE tronix diaspora is really spreading its wings and making it's presence felt on all the continents of the world, save 4 or 5. And the couple of us who are stuck in Bangalore find that exclusivity is thrust upon us. *WE* are suddenly the ones in the exotic place.

Growing up in the Indian middle class, I'm hardwired to stay in the herd. My first urge is to play catch up. The idea is to ensure that your resume of life looks as identical to your peers' as possible. Right now, I realise, mine looks too koopamandookish. I watch all these guys fly off to distant places and I begin to question my own inadequacies. I want to do all the cool things that everybody else is doing. I want to be able to start sentences with the words "When I was in the bay area...". But most of all, I want to dirty the waters of the proverbial Thames.

Zip it

Last week Tee turned into a skin head. And yesterday he wore a T-shirt that had the words 'Nazi Punk'. (Avinash also pointed out that he sat on the RIGHT wing of our building, but we'll ignore that suggestion for its contrivedness.) This was definitely cause for concern. Since I had recruited this chap I felt a moral responsibility to straighten out things. I prepared a sermon that began with the images of Treblinka and ended with a celebration of racial equality and tolerance. I confronted Tee at the pantry and pointed one finger at his bald head and the other at his shirt and asked "What's the meaning of this?". He said he had been to Tirupathi last weekend. And the Swastika was a holy hindu symbol he said. Fair enough but what the hell are the words 'Nazi Punk' supposed to mean, I asked. "adha theriyaadh saar" he said. My speech (like so many of mine before this) died a premature death.

When the laugh track went awry

The project manager foresaw bad times for our project and was bracing us for fire-fighting times ahead. Amidst all the frowning faces Kandwal was convulsed with laughter. The guy laughs for just about anything. There was another time when there was a theft in his house, and he was narrating us the story, and he was laughing like a whole pack of hyenas. I must admit it’s uplifting sometimes to have someone see the lighter side of things, but for the most part I usually feel sorry, and sometimes scared, for him. We always wondered if there was ever a cure to his laughing sickness. The answer came at Gaga’s party. Kandwal chose to shine the spotlight on himself by being the only person not to drink. JP, who had downed gallons of alcohol by now, took offense to this and began a weird interrogation. One thing led to another and …
JP: …it’s like an orgasm. Have you had an orgasm?
Kandwal: What do you mean?
JP: Oh don’t act coy! You’re 26.
Kandwal: (snigger)
JP : Don’t you jerk off?
Kandwal : (soliloquoy – Oh god of teleportation, take me away from here. And do it real quick.)
JP : Come’on I’m married and I still jerk off.
Kandwal : (pissed with the gods for not taking timely action)

JP stayed a little longer to ensure that the conversation got as uncomfortable as it possibly could. Even after he left, Kandwal’s face was flushed like he just saw Frankenstein's monster, and for a change we were on the floor laughing our guts out.

The Road Trip

I'll start this off thanking Ashtle for letting us use her car for the weekend's amazing road trip.

Bandipur, the choice of place, was purely incidental. The drive was definitely fun. Pacchi was the DJ, and in a display of incredible professionalism, he even got his own equipment! Jax was the target of a lot of ribbing about the unfortunately skewed polarity of his million-weber magnetism. As for me, I was churning out pedantic fundaes about birds. My gyaan is limited only to the feathered kind, so Pacchi wasn’t interested, but Jax, my ever-keen-protégé can now identify nearly THREE species of birds. We also played what has become the official game when the three of us meet. I don’t know what it’s called, so I’ll just call it Nonsense-building; it always seems to involve names of some well known human organs, some lingerie terminology, and for some bizarre reason, Shekar Suman. We stopped after the game took a sudden ugly turn.

After reaching our destination, the only "tourist" thing that we did there was to go on a 40-minute safari that we unanimously hated. The unexpected rain was the only positive. We lodged in a place called ‘Mountainia’. It had a brilliant view of the Nilgiris and gave us the illusion of being far away from civilization. Just perfect!. Dinner was at a place that was, judging by the quantities of each of the dishes they served us, expecting King King for supper. A combined intake of 240ml of Old Monk and 30 ml of Romanov definitely opened us all up to the dinner-table conversations. Even Pacchi, who rigorously follows the European standards of non-disclosure, was extremely candid. After this trip we now know nearly as much about his love life as we know about the shroud of Turin. There are still a couple of other mysteries, though, that still remain.
1. How come road trips with these two weirdos (One wears a woollen cap in April, the other likes to hang upside down from trees) always turn out so great?
2. Why are there so many Mynas on the road?


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