Three day break

Righto. That was pretty quick. As it turns out, three days turned out to be quite a short stint in Cal. (Must figure out a way to take a long chutti; haven’t taken one in 3 years since I joined this company and I think me system needs it… pretty soon!!)

Attended a rocking sangeet party at the Park Hotel followed the next evening by the wedding itself. Felt awesome to catch up with oldest of friends from school times. The fact that it was a hard-core Punju wedding wasn’t lost on anybody – the dulha atop the ghodi had the first swig from a bottle of whisky to kick-off the baraat celebrations! Fir kya tha? The bottle was handed from one eager baraati to another till we’d downed most of it neat. What’s more, I even found the answer to why for some unknown reason baraat-bands play “Yeh desh hai veer jawanon ka” on such occasions. Old friend Doc explained, “It takes a lot of courage to sit atop a ghodi and gallop towards what is inevitably going to be the end of your happy life.” Go figure.

I must admit, though, that I spent most of the time in Calcutta just catching up on sleep. Slept like a log on Sunday afternoon and also most of today. But that was a given. Last night, after the wedding, I headed off to Lambu’s place with Bulla and Budhau. God alone knows why Horse didn’t make it.

Lambu’s place in Salt Lake has now become special for me. Our gang has now spent quite a few merry hours there just doing the college-gang like thing; eat Maggi or order for pizza, have a beer or three (no, that wasn’t a typo) and generally just catch up on each other’s lives. Last evening was no different. Of course, all the neat whisky from the shaadi got to me and I dozed off at the first given opportunity (I’m sure these folks, especially Lambu, must’ve abused me to hell and back for being a spoilsport) but not before introducing Lambu & Budhau to the pleasures of The Big Bang Theory. This was the first time they saw a couple of episodes of the said sitcom, and I think we might have new followers. As for me, I was just very happy to have caught a glimpse of Penny after a long time!! ~evil grin~

By the way, I was on radio today evening!! A senior friend who knows a RJ in Mumbai messaged me that I must be ready to speak about a patriotic film that I really like. I said cool and promptly decided upon Lagaan (I was planning on saying how it was a non-violent version of patriotism and showed India’s unity in diversity beautifully in the rag-tag cricket team that Bhuwan put together). Only later in the evening did I find out that the RJ herself was going to speak about Lagaan!! Thank heavens I was prepared with a back-up plan and blurted out Border as my second favorite. When I did finally go live on air, the phone line was pretty noisy but I managed to strain and hear the RJ. I hope I sounded decent on live radio… don’t know whether it would match up to my “Hindustan Ki Awaaz” bit from Nirma though (I had done the voice over as “Hindustan Ki Awaz” in a spoof on Mughal-E-Azam that our juniors had done. The fact that it was my voice which had a slight baritone timbre had surprised all. Damn!! How I wish I could get my hands on a copy of that audio file).