Lets Meet!! *GROAN*

Nowadays I shudder every time I see the words “weekend plan”, “XYZ’s birthday – what plan” , “meet up”, “guys – what plans” on the subject line in my mails. Even something as harmless as “Hi guys” can send shivers down my spine.

These terror mails are mostly started by either Yellow or Aki the two people who constantly strive to keep our group together (which is a euphemistic way of saying they are pretty jobless. I know coz a coupla months back I was one of the few “striving to keep the group together”:P).

Don’t get me wrong. I love these guys. Honestly I have known them for so long that meeting them is always a pleasure but not when I have to read 73 mails (NO exaggeration. Check image). And even after reading 73 mails I am pretty clueless about the “meet”.

When I was working it was a different thing. I would check my mails 3 times every second and could delete mails faster than they were produced by my friends. But now with me checking mails just about twice during the day the amount of backlog I have is HUGE (as if backlogs in assignments weren’t enough) and at the end of the day there seems to be no consensus about the place, time, day date of the meet.

So though I get to know valuable facts like F had dosa with sauce for breakfast (ewwww) and that N is on a diet, which essentially means she will eat chocolates only twice a day instead of four times and that yellow’s manager has loud conversations on the phone and that A’s onsite coordinator appreciates her work (its very rare u see so she makes sure we all hear of it) and lots of other things, I am COMPLETELY clueless about the actual “Meet” which was the purpose of the mail.

So a frustrated me sits at 5 in the evening after my classes and patiently reads those mails trying to find out if ANY of those 73 mails even remotely talks about the meet. Nope!! Though there are a BUNCH of excuses given for not being able to come to the meet and other inane conversations no proper plans of a birthday surprise or a meet. Trust me it IS a pain when u go through EACH AND EVERY mail, when u click on each and every one of those 73 little tabs to find out what the other person has said and still remain as clueless as ever.

And following are the top excuses which are given by the “group” to not attend a meet.

1. I can’t come because I have to take a bath man. So you guys carry on.

(No shit. The person who has used this excuse has not only used it once but several times as a result of which we have stopped calling her for the meets. Cleanliness is before Friendliness apparently :P)

2. The sun is too hot on Sundays. I don’t like to come out on a Sunday.

LOL!! :D. This is my favorite excuse. And the rest of us would go, “eh??? Errr. Dude!! The same sun shines all through the week. How can it be any hotter or colder on Sunday. If anything it should probably take a break and shine less on Sunday”.. But this person can be excused because when the sun is not “too” hot she always makes it to the meet AND on time.

3. Hey I am on a diet. So if we go out we are BOUND to eat out and that’s bad for my diet. Please. This is my first sincere attempt at dieting (YAWN!!). Don’t spoil it. Why don’t you come over to my place?

The person who gives this excuse lives in one godforsaken corner of the city and reaching that place is like undertaking an expedition. So all of us politely back out!! :P.

4. My parents are sleeping. Someone has to lock the door if I leave. Sorry I can’t come. Gee. That’s seriously the lamest I have heard till date. Ermm.. How long would it take to drop a vessel in the kitchen, act like it was by mistake, wake a parent and ask them to lock the door?

5. I have to study for my mock CAT (*YAWWWWN!!*).

The person who uses this excuse would probably excel in CAT if they posed questions about sleeping patterns of humans and had average sleeping time as a criterion for admissions.

6. I have office.

Sometimes genuine but most frequently abused excuse. Used when you are actually lazy to go out and so call up a friend and say “office maaan!! Soo sorry” :P

7. It’s my mother in law’s birthday guys.

Sighhhhh!! No comments.

8. I have assignments.

The person giving this excuse is an extremely nice person who usually makes it for every meet so she can be excused :P

So these are some of the most commonly used/abused excuses. And FINALLY by the time we actually reach a consensus, decide on a date and time we realize that it’s Monday and we have effectively lost the weekend in mailing each other. (We quit calling each other long time ago when we realized that all of us are equally bad at picking up the phone and answering calls or talking sense for more than 28 seconds.)

Effectively by the end of the day we have a terribly bad strike rate. Out of 25 meets planned 3 materialize and only 1 has all of us together (in which everyone will forget to bring the camera so we don’t even have any proof of THAT one meet when we were all together.). Going by statistics the only times when we have succeeded in meeting without hearing any excuses from anyone were the times when someone got married. And that was in December of last year.

I think it’s time someone got married. It’s been quite long since I saw everyone together.

Lets meet!! :P

P.S: I am GLAD gmail shows all 73 mails as just one mail. Imagine having to open 73 different mails and delete them one by one. *Shudders uncontrollably*

Weekday paanch aur weekend sirf do??? BAHUT nainsaafi hai!! :P

If u were born after the year 2000 (even thats no excuse actually) or if you are living under a rock chances are that you wouldnt have seen Sholay and dont understand the title of this post. This is the dialogue which comes in the BAAP of all Hindi movies Sholay and our quintessential villain Gabbar Singh says it. Errrr. he doesnt say it verbatim but he says something like this to indicate that it is a great injustice that 7 men fought against 2 men. Ahhh!! Anyway the crux of this post is not the dialogues of Sholay. (Ah ha!! i heard you say 'your post doesnt have a crux, it only sucks'. HUMPH!! :-\)


So it has been yet another great weekend. Finally after 1 and a half years of Aki calling us to bangalore every weekend six of us decided to grace bangalore with our presence and what a weekend it has been!! One amazing trip to banaglore, mekedaatu, the promise of a waterless chunchi(or is it chuchi or chuchu or chenchu??) falls and bannerghatta national park and yet again coming to office on monday morning felt like someone had pushed me into a garbage dump. Notice how i write my posts about my weekends two or three days after my weekend? I need those two three days to moon about and be depressed and generally go about having a face like a dead duck. I tend to write my posts only after i have recovered from my weekend hangover!! :P


I aint gonna bore u guys by giving u details about mekedattu, sangam, chunchi, bannerghatta etc. There is enough information on the internet.

But i will say that it is a great place to go with a couple of great friends and have a weekend out being silly and having a whale of a time.


Surprisingly i didnt find bangalore that irritating this time around. Usually the weather, the "we-will-have-boards-only-in-kannada" buses, the "so-slow-that-i-d-prefer-walking" traffic, the "we-dont-know-any-other-word-except-gothilla" people and the "so-sweet-i-dunno-if-its-kesari-or-sambhar" sambhar get on my nerves but this time none of it bothered me (errrr because the weather was perfect, not too hot, not too cold, we didnt take the bus at all except to go to bannerghatta, since we were out of the city all the time i didnt get a taste of the traffic much and thankfully we didnt have to ask for direction to be answered with a gothilla. Aaaah!! Pro-Bangaloreans i am sorry and maybe i am biased or maybe because i have been in chennai for so long i cant appreciate or love any other city as much as i love Chennai)


Akiiiii, Thanks for being a wonderful host and also for the treat in Metro and errrr please dont tell anyone about that goof up i did in Metro about the train leaving and catching the next one. OMG!! i dont think i will ever live that down!! :D


My IQ levels on this trip to bangalore were at an all time low. I was unsually absent minded, pathetically slow in understanding things, horrendously stupid and kept saying things which made no sense whatsoever.

Me: Hey Sandy who paid for the caps
Sandy: I did Revs
Me: oh ok. I need to keep an account of who is spending what.
after 5 minutes
Me: oh by the way Sandy who paid for the caps?
Sandy: ^*%#^#^#$@

Sandy: Hey maybe we should get a breakfast parcel for the rest of the girls Aki

Me: Yeah good idea.

Aki: Yeah. I will call them and ask them what they wantMe: Yeah ok

(after 2 mins when Aki was talking on the phone to the others)

Me: Heyyyyyyy!! i have a great idea. Why should all of them come here and have breakfast? We can pack a parcel for them and take it home right??

Aki: Duh!!!!!

Sighhh!! Slowly and steadily (or rather at an exponential speed ) i think i am losing it!!

I also spent some time with a friend who recently got married. It gives me immense happiness when i see a very good friend of mine happily married and settled after having had a somewhat tumultuous life. He has married an angel or rather a super woman who cooks amazingly well from morning to night for 20 people, maintains the house like a hotel room, talks well with everyone whether she knows them or not and also manages to study for her exams and all this just 2 months after her marriage!! Sheeesh!! She is the kind of girl i would never want my mother to meet or see!! The ideal woman!! :P

So it was a great weekend and i just realised that since the start of this year i have been home only one weekend!! :P. Nowadays if i stay home weekends my grandmother thinks i am sick and gets all worried!! :P

Sighhhh!! Oh for 5 day weekends!!

Some pictures. :)

errrrr..this is not a bunch of retards. Thats us doing kung fu!!:P:P. Notice the one on the extreme left hanging like a clothes hanger in a cupboard!! :P

Doing what we do best. Being stupid!! :P

A friendly zebra in bannerghatta!! :)

of friends and dirty kitchens and operation sunrise III :)

So one of my closest and bestest friends (if we were any closer our relationship wouldn’t be legal in many countries if u know what i mean) is getting married and everything is happening so fast that before u can say 'what the fulcrum' it’s all over!! 2 weeks back she didn’t even know if she was getting married and now she is engaged and going to be married in a week!! And before u can blink ur eye..Whoooooosh!! She is married.

There are times when Life flies past you so fast that you want to catch it by its shoulder and go "whoaaa!! dude. not so fast". This is one of those moments.
Anyway i am digressing. So since she is getting married this close friend of mine (lets call her CF) called all of us and said "One last operation sunrise!!?? please??" (read PART I and PART II of operation sunrise if interested!! ;))and we just couldn’t say no. So this weekend has been one crazy weekend where i have managed to do maximum number of things in minimum possible time and am feeling quite good and super-womanish about myself.

Before CF threw a bomb saying she was going to get married we had been planning to shift this weekend from our place in Besant Nagar to a place in Adyar owing to safety reasons (errr. not our safety but the safety of our neighbors whose safety was being threatened because of our presence)

So realizing our responsibility and tight schedules and also realizing that we had to finish packing on Friday night and shift by Saturday evening to implement operation sunrise on Saturday night, we sincerely played scrabble the whole of Friday night and wasted time till 1 in the night fighting with each other and justifying that yikes, oops, jeez, eeks etc were words which we could make in scrabble. Hunger overtook responsibility and we trooped into the kitchen at 1.30 to cook some maggi and suddenly realized that the kitchen looked like hurricane Nisha, Rita and Katrina had had a competition as to who could cause most damage to the kitchen and all three of them had had a go at the kitchen and ravished it as best as they could. (Nisha won. She is Indian after all!! :P)

so even as one of us made maggi the other two started packing the kitchen or rather throwing stuff because all the stuff within all the bottles had rotten. Our kitchen at that point of time could have been a biology lab considering the different kinds of fungus each bottle had. green, yellow, white, red. you name it and we had it. Not to forget the worms inside one vessel (Hey there is some maggi left in this vessel. Its moving!! you IDIOT. it’s not maggi. They are worms. Blechhhhhhhh!!) The reader ought not to jump to wrong conclusions regarding our levels of cleanliness and hygiene. Given our busy lifestyles (oooh!!) and our tight work schedules (aaah!!) and the fact that the kitchen is on the first floor (errr!!) and so we need to climb a flight of stairs to reach it (ahem!!) our kitchen is not exactly the place where Tarla Dalal or Sanjeev Kapoor can say "Ab thodi si hari mirch daal dijiye aur yeh ho gaya thaiyaar aapka swadishth *insert name of food item which uses hari mirch-i can’t think of anything!! :P*"

So anyway by the time we had thrown everything, finished with the kitchen and packed exactly one carton (one feet by one feet) of kitchen utensils it was 3 and we decided to call it a day.
Saturday morning (errr afternoon) dawned nice and bright and three inspired warriors (girls), attacked the house with a vengeance last seen when Alexander the great set about to conquer the world.
(errmm, i am assuming Alexander the great was scared of lizards and spiders and roaches and dust :rolling eyes:, which is how one of my friends was)

Fermie : Revs, can u please take this bag out from the loft?
Me: Fermie cant u see i am busy packing this carton. you are taller than me. get it yourself or stand on that chair
Fermie: errr.i am scared there might be lizards behind it
Me: so?
Fermie: mmm, so i thought u could shoo them away and give me the bag
Me: and what do i look like? a lizard charmer? what do u want me to do? dance and sing in front of the bag jutting my tongue out at regular intervals and make the lizard come out
Fermie: Revs, please
me: Fermie, no
Fermie: please
Me: no
Fermie: humph
Me: HUMPH to u too.

So given how brave my roomies are, packing 2 rooms with no furniture and just clothes took us a good 5 hours and by the time we finished we realized that our house apart from housing us had housed umpteen lizards and roaches, three "pooraans" (what do u call them in English? the mean poisonous centipede like creatures), hundreds of ants of different sizes and colors and lots of other fauna. we had been sitting on top of the rain forest without realizing it.

By 6 we had finished shifting to the new house, finished admiring our place, taken a lot of photographs, and checked out the neighborhood for cute looking guys (we found that the whole building was only occupied by octogenarians who had obviously never seen girls wearing jeans in their building. So much for cute looking guys!!).

Jeez!! I have just completed Saturday and this post is getting way too long!!
(operation sunrise part III and the rest to be continued in the next post and yeah!! quit thinking "Sheeesh!! there is actually more??" :P)

Of silly friends, the english language, office and marathons!! :)

1. So one of my closest friends Akila has gone to Sweden on an “on-site” trip. Being the first one to go from our group of “we-are-useless-and- we-hate-the-software-field-but-we-still-will-rot-here” group, all of us were enormously excited about her trip and asked her to mail us ASAP about Sweden, her hotel, her life, her work everything. Now Aki, nice though she is, for the life of her cannot write or type long mails. She uses all kinds of short forms whose meanings we are never able to decipher.
If I were to give an appropriate analogy I would say “Aki is to long letters as Osama Bin Laden is to world peace” or “aki is to words as maneka Gandhi is to non-vegetarianism”. You get the drift? She cant write.

So the other day we get a mail from her saying

(quoting her verbatim)

“hotel provides bf....thr r lots of stuff for bf...but then they don display the names”

And she sends this to our group of 6 friends all of whom are perverts in their own rights and whose thoughts are as straight as a Jalebi!!

One friend replies saying “they give u boy friends in the hotel?? Whoa?? Are they like tall dark and handsome. What do u care about the names of the ‘BF’??”

Another one replies saying “Aki, what the hell is wrong with u and what kind of a hotel are u staying in which provides blue films?? Eeeeeeyuck. And this is company accommodation??? And u want the names of the movies??? Eeeeeeee!!”

Another one thought it was buffet.

And not a single one of us actually understood that by ‘bf’ she meant breakfast.
It was only after she clarified, that we were enlightened!! :|

2.Sometimes wrong messages i.e messages of which you are not the intended recipient can be fun!! On Saturday I was to meet another very close friend of mine, Milinta, in bessy at 6 in the evening to share some high profile gossip about who’s going out with who and who’s marrying who. (Sighh!! Yeah. We are a group of sad individuals who meet at besant nagar ever other weekend, sit at Barista and discuss the lives of other people over a plate of dark temptation. Who was the dude who said “Great Minds Discuss Ideas; Average Minds Discuss Events; Small Minds Discuss People?” Yeah, so we are small minds!! :P). So on Friday after a friendly round of unparliamentarily words had been exchanged and after we had politely called each other a “stinking pig” and “rotting piece of garbage” for not calling/mailing, we fixed up a time to meet and “discuss people” we hung up and I suddenly get a message from Milinta saying (quoting her verbatim)“I am meeting Revs tomorrow. :) :) :). God. I dunno y but I am so so so happy”

:D:D. I was flabbergasted when I saw that message coz among us friends we have a rule. No gooey sappy senti shit whatsoever!! Anyway not the one to let go a chance to throw some weight around all I can say is “Jeeez Mi!! I know I am smart and sexy and awesome and funny and intelligent and people are thronging and languishing outside my gates to catch a glimpse of me but do u really have to be so explicit??” :P

Awwwwwwwwwwwwww Mi!!wipe that embarrassed expression off your face. Now not only me but the whole world knows that u like me and die to spend time with me!! :D

3. I hate the English language. I think it is the most illogical and ridiculous language ever. This Saturday as I was volunteering at deepam and teaching the kids the spellings of a couple of words I was stumped by some of the questions posed by the kids. I mean sample this. I asked a kid the spelling of culture and he says “c-u-l-c-h-e-r” and I go “no, that’s wrong. Its c-u-l-t-u-r-e” and he says “but last week u asked me to spell teacher. Wouldn’t culture be spelt the same way?” and I am like “errrr. Ahem.. cough. That’s english” and the boy says to his friends “Yenna da indha akka ke onnum therila”!! :| :|. Pretty embarrassing u say and I completely agree. I dunno how to tell the kids that, that’s how the English language is where “feet smell and noses run” and “plural of goose is geese but moose remains moose” and so many other things. Next was teaching them how to use the “conditional formatting” feature in excel. Now I am pathetic at excel. I cant even add two numbers using excel and I have never heard of conditional formatting. Needless to say I made a complete fool of myself in front of 20 kids half my age with one of them telling me that I if I wanted to enter a formula in excel I must put an “=” sign in front!! :-\
Sigh!!! so much for having done “computer science and engineering”!!

4. my enthusiasm (for people who don’t know, I have been blessed with amazing levels of enthusiasm and energy and I very rarely get tired or lazy) reaches a nadir when I am organizing some activities in office. I hate office, I hate organizing games for people who are about as enthusiastic and interested as a wet sponge. I know I am being judgmental but I sit like a zombie in all the “Connect” (that’s what the “fun” group in my account is called) meetings keeping my mind shut and refusing to give any ideas and refusing to refute crappy ideas like “lets play housie or lets play antakshari (who plays antakshari except 14 year old school girls going on a bus to picnics)”.
This is soooo not me but I just cant bring myself to be enthusiastic about something being done in office. :-\

5. I ran the marathon. Yay yay!! I ran all 7 kms.
Ok. I walked 6.75 kms and ran the rest. Don’t blame me. There were about 50000 people running and there wasn’t even place to crawl let alone walk or run. The bottom line is that we finished running all 7 kms!! I ran mainly to get a “I love Chennai“ t-shirt but didn’t get it!! :(

So this Saturday fermie and I were in odyssey browsing through the books section to buy a gift for a friend.

Suddenly I notice this book called “World’s best short stories”. I open the book , see names like E.M.Forester, Saki, O henry and my BP goes up by several notches, my heart starts beating fast and with my fingers crossed I flip the book to look at the cost, give a huge sigh, realize that I have already bought this month’s quota of books and unwillingly place the book back on the shelf not willing to let go off it.

Fermie standing in front of another shelf is holding princess diaries part I (errr. yeah meg cabot is Fermie’s favorite writer. If u know Fermie you will NOT find this surprising). The book which she has wanted to buy for a long long time. She has all other parts except the first one. She slowly flips the book looks at the price tag, lets a huge sigh and replaces it again.

Suddenly she looks at me and says “Revs, u know what? I didn’t get u anything for ur birthday. I saw your reaction to that short stories book. I m gonna get u that”

And I go “U know Fermie, even I never got u a book for ur birthday. I am gonna get u princess diaries part I”

We look at each other for a minute and start laughing like crazy, get weird glances from an old man holding a book by Leo Tolstoy (weight of book = weight of old man) go to the billing counter and bill our books with a huge grin on our faces

I walk away with my short stories and she walks away with her princess diaries, with no guilty conscience of having spent too much on books. Buying gifts for friends aint such a bad thing, is it? ;)

Friendship - I just love that word!! :)

P.S: Ultimately we never got anything for the friend for whom we went to buy a gift!! :-\

P.P.S: Errr if any of u guys are having birthdays in the near future do come with me to odyssey. There is this book which I have wanted to buy for quite some time, and I am sure there is some book which you would like to have too!! :P

P.P.P.S: the book which I was referring to in the previous P.S is the entire calvin and hobbes collection worth 4000 bucks!! :rolling eyes:.