Prattling about a weekend

OK. This has taken a long time coming. But, rest assured. I am not to blame for this. I blame my laziness partly and partly writer’s block. You see, I am a good writer and one has to expect such things.

The summer is almost coming to an end. My summer job ended on a Friday. The same day my exams got over. The weekend was a welcome break. Well, not that I needed one. All the summer was a break. So, what did I do over the weekend? Read on to know more!

Orkut is an online community. Many of you guys know that. I am a part of a community called Iyers (my caste) in orkut. This is a pretty cool online hangout place. Nice people. Interesting discussions and controversies. New people to meet. Everywhere around the world, every now and then, people who are part of this community met and had fun.

After much planning, five of us decided to meet, and this meet was christened “OI Bay Area meet”. The participants – Balu Natarajan (nicknamed kottai), Sripathy (naadhas), Anand (naara), Shivkumar and myself. No gals. Can you believe that? Well, we took it in our stride and go ahead with the meeting. None of us knew each other before. I had talked to Balu and Shivkumar over the phone twice before that. We had taken part in many of the discussions in the Iyers community. That’s it.

Saturday night Shivkumar came to pick me and up and we reached Balu’s place. We started talking. You know, normal chit-chat. It never felt to me that these are new people. I was sitting there and chatting with them as if we were best friends. What made this possible? Was that we all spoke the same language? Or was it that we come from a similar background? Or that we had taken part in discussions? I am an introvert and it takes me sometime to get comfortable with new people and start a discussion. That day I was talking with them and felt no apprehension at all. That fact amazed me a lot.

Once we were comfortably settled in the couch and talking, one by one, stories about each came into the discussion and that day was a bad one for Balu. He was teased a lot. He was smiling at that. He understood that it was all in good fun and nobody meant anything bad. Do the same thing to me, and I would probably storm out of the room, because I am a bit testy. I really admire Balu for this.

The discussion went on and we were talking about the adventures or misadventures from our undergraduate institutions. Balu’s Gangotri incident, Bangalore mission etc were explained to me and Shivkumar. Then, we also talked about the ventures of everyone’s classmates. Such fun I have never had in my life.

Then, we went to watch Mangal Pandey. I liked the movie, except for the music and songs. And one item number in a historical movie? That’s what I call crass commercialization. Only Bollywood can do something like this. Ah, that brings to mind the level of Hindi Balu knows. We were at the theater. One of the theater employees was at the gate checking the tickets. He asks how many of us were there. And Balu replies “saath” and walks in. He was so proud of himself when he asked us “Machan, eppadi correct-a six people vandhu irukom-ndratha Hindi-la sonnen”. We were roaring with laughter at that point. And Balu said this to a Hispanic guy, who was talking in broken English and wouldn’t even have a smattering of knowledge about Hindi.

After the movie, we returned to Balu’s place. All this time, both Sripathy was giving a big build-up about Balu’s Gangotri’s incident. As any normal person, me and Shivkumar were interested in this gossip and were literally pestering Sripathy to say what that incident was. Once we reached home, he detailed to us about how Balu ….Nope you don’t get to hear that. But I can assure you that it was very funny and all of us were roaring with laughter. We discussed useless stuff all through the night, with some booze and the Ashes to go with it.

I came back home at 4 AM. Out and out, it was a thoroughly enjoyable day. All of this was possible, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee for inventing that indispensable part of our lives, called the World Wide Web. Thinking how much the net has pervaded our lives leaves me dazed. Think of it – when was the last time you “Google”-d something? The net has become so much of a necessity and has made us all addicts. Without this invention, you wouldn’t have the chance to read my needless thoughts (claps claps – “title vandhuduchu. Tamil padam paakaravangaluku puriyum idhu.”)

Ps: This has been pretty much a Balu-centric post. So, before I sign off, one more thing about him. He is an ardent Koundamani fan. He remembers most of the dialogs uttered by Koundan and uses it to lighten up the situation.