another delayed post...

my day out...

...may be with a lesser fan following than the movie, but close to that much fun. Very, very close. Last saturday I went out for an office picnic, or more like a 2 hour parasailing plan that most luckily turned into a day long picnic :) I would've written earlier, but there were just too many pics and videos to drool over, and show-off to friends :P

We planned to assemble at 7:15 in mini-groups and re-assemble into a larger one at 7:45 AM Saturday morning . After all the good-hearted early morning wake-up calls by the night shifters, which were responded to with much grumbling & mumbling, frantic pick-up and "im waiting" calls, amidst of which I almost got left behind ;), almost,, we manage to assemble, re-assemble and finally leave by 8:30 AM in a convoy of 3 cars, all of which, as I was to realise later, were driven with great panache. Given that we are talking about nearly 15 people dragged out of bed one early cold January morning, I think we made pretty decent timing. This was followed by a great drive accompanied with snacks and singing , along the highways of gurgaon & sohna, an awesome strech of some flyover, I forget the name, taking a wrong turn, customary for any group going on a picnic and finally reached our destination at 10:00 AM, only an hour late ;)

Sorrounded by mustard farms on all sides, the field expanse was vast, by any means. After some initial excited photgraphy and instructions we were too excited to heed,,the actualfun began. One person at a time was secured with a gear, containing lots of hooks, a rope tied to a jeep and ofcourse the parasail. Once the gear was secured, the jeep drove off, tugging at the parasail ropes,as a result of which, sometimes aided by a little running on the parasailer's part, the parasail took off. The whole experience wouldn't have lasted for more than 7-8 seconds,I guess, but the feeling of being air-borne, at 250 ft from the ground,even if you were tied to a rope, is, quite literally out of the world!!!
One after another, we went off and came back asking for more. Ofcourse, that's how the jeep left us in the end, asking for more, since there were not second chances :P

Accompanied by a friendly game of football, as friendly as football games can be, volleyball, and followed by kho-kho, yes even that, and lots of photography ( a good excuse for lazy boneheads like me trying to avoid any kind of physical activity requiring more than moving a finger ;) the parasailing experience left us thrilled , to say the least. And we moved on towards our next destination,
Dumdum lake, a local tourist attraction. I would give you the exact location and distance in kilometers, but one, I don't intend to write an itinerary and two, I dont know. :) All I know is, 4 boats, 15 people, and a lake. We rowed, and rammed the boats, quite deliberately ofcourse, splashed water over each other, on the same cold January afternoon, but oh well, who cared by now,got stuck in the mud near the shore, jumped in and waded the boats out, and collapsed back on the shore.

Some more photography, a car-race back till a local dhaba, disgusting amounts of food which all of us ate ravenously, quite literally, and another great drive back home via another great road I never knew existed anywhere near Delhi/NCR.

The traffice jam as soon as we entered the city would've jolted me back to reality, but I was too tired.
I reached home , and crashed for a goodnight's sleep, dreaming of being air borne , soon again, this time... without the rope may be .....

I have the best friends in the whole world! and that makes me the luckiest girl ever :) not only they actually put up with me, (believe me difficult is easy if you're comparing it to me) , with all my mood swings, temperamental remarks, awkward questions, non-stop cribbing and God-knows-what-not , this time they actually gave me a surprise for my birthday!!! they took me out, promising a small simple idyllic picnic, and before I knew what was happening, we had crossed gurgaon and were on Delhi-Jaipur expressway! A plan I had categoricallly refused for, I was all sulking, not caring about their effort, ready to get off the car , bang the door in their faces and march off, if only they would pullover. I did ruin that part for them , coz then they had to tell me what was happening, and after cooling me off with road-side ganne-ka-juice, and sm pics, they took me to dumduma lake near sohna. I cut the cake, had the birthday song sung for me, even got gifts, despite the tantrum I'd thrown on the way!!! Then we boated in the not-so-clean-nor-so-deep-but-no-option dumduma lake, and had a blast of a time even there. Trying to row a boat and going more in concentric circles than along the lake, each one of us trying to do worse than the others, ;) and ofcourse I won.!!! We had lunch at a roadside dhaba, another long standing demand of mine, followed by a long drive back home by the road I preferred , we crashed Costa at the end of the day, quite literally since we were too tired to sit up, and after a few hours, reluctantly left for home.

And all of this 3 days in advance coz I had said I was too busy to meet them on my birthday!!! So much so that at the end of the day I felt my birthday was already over!

The most awesome day by the most awesome set of friends on earth :D
(touchwood!!)

Kaun Umraoo....kaisi adaa aur kiski jaan....

Smthg I had written long back, but forgot to publish


I recently went to see this latest much-overhyped flick with a friend. I am not exceptionally fond of movies or movie stars, I'd rather be in the comforts of my couch, empowered with a huge pack of potato chips in one hand and the remote in another surfing my day away. Moreover, spending money to sit idle in one chair for three hours is too much of a temptation for me to rather nuzzle up in my bed and get a good sleep. But well, the hype over the movie, the praise of the original version by family veterans and, most of all, sheer boredom, made us go.

We reached, as always, 10 minutes after the movie was supposed to begin. We got the topmost row, and a "Enjoy-the-movie" accompanied with a sly smile. We had known the movie was not a big hit, and I guess that's what made the ticket-guy give us a sly smile ....ah!! how difficult to live in a world of prejudices and presumptions! what would people not think of a guy and a girl going for a not-so-hit movie ... or rather what is all that they would think But well, more on the rhetoric later, we entered the hall and realised the extent of slyness of the smile and its full implications sank in. There were, in all, including the two of us, 11 people in the entire theater!! I've seen, having been a regular Delhi collegiate, and keeping up with the rep , practically every movie that released while I was in college, and yet a theater THIS empty, was a new experience for me.

Realising what probably a bore of a time we were in for, we mutually decided we will refuse to get bored, come what may, and would crack a joke at every line. and learn some urdu, if possible :)

So there we were, two great pals, sitting in a nearly empty theater ,, watching a period movie, with a much overhyped actress and bad reviews, prepared for the worst,and yet determined to have the time of our lives...

For the less enlightened and more fortunate, allow me to say a few words, in english for now (urdu can wait till i learn it), about the movie. Its about a girl, who gets abducted, while a still a child, from her financially constrained but loving and wholesome family staying in a forlorn village of the then Awadh, and sold off to a prostitute in Lucknow. The girl gets a luxurious upbringing and more than a decent education in subjects beyond music and dance as well. But as luck (read story writer) would have it, she falls in love with her very first professional encounter. And then comes the usual obstacles put in the way of two lovers by the inevitable family cries of honor by brothers & fathers, even the prostitute-clientele, and societal differences , the synchronized glycerine overflows by women of all color , caste , and ahem, well, character , and the easy-to-miss occasional villain and ofcourse the hard-to-dismiss misunderstandings thrown in to complete the drama.

All this drama, leaves the lovers separated, the families lost and divided, the ekta-kapoor fan following in the audience beating the women on screen with genuine tears, and you wondering why would , a prostitute who doesnt mind screaming her love in front of the world would not utter the truth in front of her lover to clear out the misunderstanding ?? and then why would she actually use her profession to find out about her family, and then shy away from the world finding out lest it brings bad name to the family, and then go and meet her family in broad daylight?? i mean could she not have faked her identity ?? what was she thinking, or was she (or the story writer) thinking at all?? and then, that perfectly "perfect" woman, with her fame and clientele still intact give everything up and go into a permanent reclusion? if that's what she had to do, why she didnt she give up when her lover left her or before she went looking for her family, i mean,.... then she wud've gained smthg out of leavng her profession and after she'd lost all stakes and had nothing else to lose, she could've atleast continued being rich amd famous,. or even if she had to give evthg up, did she necesarrily have to go back to the same city and live a life of desolation? why didnt she just go to some other far-off place and started afresh,. as smrich fat lady's maid maybe. i mean if it was too difficult for people to travel to far off places, it must've been easier for people to lose their identities rt?

it left me thinking if logic did not exist in the days this story was originally written? or come to think of it, does it exist now , with people still making such movies and serials where 1 character gets married atleast 5 times in less than 5 years to perhaps all members of the clan and outside, smtimes, multiple times to the same person!! and weirdly, no matter how many times a woman has been married/divorced/jailed/even "murdered and re-incarnated", she does not a SINGLE fine line!!! she looks EXACTLY as a grandmother, as she did the day of her marriage.!!

oh-well-whatever!!! the movie made for a great time for the two of us atleast, as while struggling with noting down hard urdu words we cud use later to show-off in our vocab ;) had all the attention of the rest of the 9 audience, not-to-mention the wrath of the ekta-kapoor audience in those 9 people, and back cramps from laughing too much .... that does explain one thing though, we are better and definitely more of crowd-pullers than abhishek and aishwarya, its just that we choose not-to-be, ;)

sar se utar kar kaandhey pe bikhar jaati hain,
kambakht zulfon ko bahut sar pe chadhaa rakha hai


.....i heard these smwhere

yunhi

aaj jab hum yunhi ghar ki
chaukhat par baithe so rahe thhey
daftar najaakar dhoop mein sustane
ke sapno mein kho rahe thhey

achanak dimmag par chhaya
waqt ka kaala saaya,
ehsaas hua ki adhaa ghanta
ho gaya intezaar karte
ab tak hamari
gaadi waala kyun nahi aaya

hadbada kar apne sehkarmi
ko hamne kiya phone
toh pata chala ki
hum toh sapne hi dekhte reh gaye,
aur hamara wahan-chalak
kal hi gaya tha chhutti ka bol

khayal aaya ki hum bhi
mauke ka fayda uttha lein
sahab ko phone kar
bimari ka bahan bana dein

par yeh kambakht tankhwa
jo ab tak nahi aayi
loan ki kisht ke haathon mazboor,
rickshey ko awaaz lagayi,
"10 rupaiye mein chalte ho kya bhai"!

ab dafter mein baithe
kismat ko rote hain
humse bhale toh kam
padhe likhe driver babu
kam-s-kam ghar pe araam se chadar
taan ke sote hain