Operation Sunrise - III

DISCLAIMER: Pardon the length. You can choose not to read it but i had to record each and every one of these events and didnt have the heart to axe any part of this post!! :)

So where did i leave u guys last. Ah!! yes. hanging on to every word of mine and wondering when i would write my next post on the actual operation sunrise. :P (ok probably not. what u were probably thinking is "why the hell should i read about how she stayed up all night with her friends" and quickly closed the window or navigated to better blogs. but just this once humor me this once. ok?? :))

Seriously where was i? Yes. We had finished packing and CF (Close friend) and her fiance (lets call him CFF) where the first visitors to our new home.

Its funny when u meet the fiancé of a really close friend and like him. You experience a motley of emotions. For one you are insanely happy for her because something tells you that this silent quiet guy with a sincere smile and placid demeanor is going to keep her happy. On the other hand you are also inexplicably sad that now you cant call your friend up at 2 in the morning to tell her about how you accidentally placed your jeans on top of a rotten banana peel and now your favorite pair of jeans is covered with green color yucky looking fungus and laugh like crazy till 3 (Err the jeans part is a true incident which I will write about some day when I can think of my favorite pair of jeans without tears welling in my eyes. Fermie, I will never forgive you for leaving the banana peel on the chair. NEVER!! :-\)

After meeting our gang of hooligans CFF decided he had had enough of us and dropped us off at Pupil in Besant Nagar where we made CF give us a treat for managing to convince someone to marry her. I might sound really cheap but I always feel extra hungry when someone is treating but that day I guess I was so happy for CF that happiness filled a major part of my stomach and I didn’t eat much. (Ok!! Cutting the crap I didn’t eat much because I was too busy drooling over a poster of George Clooney in the restaurant) For the first time we weren’t the centre of attention in a place because of the racket we created but for ordering something called the “chicken sizzler” which lived up to its name and sizzled and cackled really really loudly and all eyes in the joint turned to look at us suspiciously. I mean imagine you are sitting in a decent eatery, looking deep into the eyes of your girl friend, holding her hands and just about to utter those three words while she smiles coyly and suddenly you hear a “sizzle, siszzzzzzzz, shizzzz, lizzz. Cackle cackle tee hee” sound (the cackle cackle was us). How irritating would that be? Multiply that irritation factor by 10, square it and that is how irritated you will feel when u r sitting in a restaurant where we happen to be eating too!! Don’t blame us. Its our parents. They just didn’t bring us up well. :P I don’t remember my mother ever teaching me to eat quietly, laugh daintily, talk meaningfully and exude an air of elegance.

Whatever!! After everyone at Pupil had breathed a sigh of relief (read: after we had left) I got the bright idea that since this was the last Operation Sunrise when CF would be a bachelorette we ought to celebrate it with cake. So what do u do when u have a bus to catch in ten minutes, a bright idea in your head, enthusiasm galore to execute it and crazy friends to cheer you up and give you company to execute it? You tell CF that u need to buy some aspirin, shoo her off the bus stand, locate the nearest cake shop (coffee day) order the first cake which u can lay ur eyes on (chocolate fantasy) gape at another CF’s face when the waiter asks you “what do I write on the cake ma’am”, settle for ‘ot appen? something which we very frequently asked each other in hostel to cheer the other person up. Basically “what happened” with a heavy Gujju accent on “what”. (you really are not allowed to raise doubts regarding our sanity or lack of it) grab the cake (pay of course!! Sheesh!! We aint that cheap) rush to the bus stand only to realize you have missed the last bus to CF’s place, ask CF and others who are in the bus to plead with the bus driver, make a mad dash to the next stop the bus is likely to stop at, make a fool of yourself in the middle of the road by waving like madmen at the bus driver asking him to stop, get to hear a couple of new and interesting words in Tamil from the driver, settle down in your seat and laugh like hyenas.

This operation sunrise was planned in CF’s place – at Ayanavaram which is not even in Chennai. Its about 20-25 kms from Adyar (which we like to call the centre of the city!! :P) and it takes a good half hour to reach there from Besant Nagar. And on the bus journey as Atif crooned in my ear and the gentle polluted breeze blew on my face I caught on my sleep for the day.

So what do u talk about when there are 7 of you in a room and one is about to get married in a week? We discovered that an impending marriage changes nothing and we gossiped into the night reliving each and every moment of four wonderful years of college life. We talked about the “marriage class” which CF and CFF had to attend before marriage for the church to accept their union and the “things” which are spoken about in the class. We spoke about that time during the first sem when two of us had made a list of the “worst looking boys” in class and how it accidentally landed in the hands of one of the boys in the list and how we were threatened by mean looking boys in the second month in college life.

About the time in second semester when we finally came to our senses and were able to separate wheat from the chaff and differentiate between good friends and bad friends, about all those semester exam times when we had the maximum fun (almost all nights before sem exams have been OS nights actually) doing everything except studying, sitting in the mess at 3 in the morning drinking tea and supposedly studying probability and queuing theory but gossiping about A and B and wondering what it was that A saw in B. its no wonder that most of us flunked that paper. :P. about that time in fifth semester when the rain played havoc but bought all of us close together, about the microprocessors exam when we didn’t study at all, extremely confident that the exams would be postponed and horror of horrors we DID have the exam the next day, about our very first singles party, about the time we got caught for ragging in second year and almost got suspended and had to beg and plead the principal to let us off the hook, about the cultural times when in the name of doing “work” we would break the curfew and come back to hostel only at 3 or 4 in the morning, about the times we pleaded with the security (‘Please thatha, indha oru vaati let us go inside. We PROMISE we will come in time next time’) to let us in after curfew time, the time we discovered Makku, the time when after Holi I asked the head of the boys and girls hostel what right he had to come into the ladies hostel mistaking him for a peon. To this day all my friends believe that because my face was so badly disfigured with all the holi colors in the them I didn’t get suspended because he couldn’t recognize me!! :D, about all those inter college basketball matches, our only chance to feast our eyes on some good looking boys, about the time we formed all those gangs in hostel (the final count of gangs at the end of final year was I think 33. I am sure we missed a couple). I cant even name some of them. Ranging from the GG’s to the OG’s to the Robin Hood’s I firmly believe that if we had invested the time we spent forming gangs in studying all of us would have been university toppers, all those nights when everyone would beg and plead with Fermie and me (the night owls) to wake them up, eventually not study anything and listen to stories from anyone willing to tell them. those tense moments before the semester results when a last column full of P’s was what we desired, the times we cried even though we had cleared but a friend had got the feared and dreaded F, the times we hung outside the staff room begging and pleading for minimum internals, mercilessly teasing all the staff, getting the dubious distinction of being the unruliest “girls” the hostel had ever seen, the time when we latched the warden in her room and very innocently opened the door the next day and sympathized with her while the rest of us laughed uncontrollably even as the warden fumed and said “I cant able to understand why someone locking me inside in middle of night”. Yeah. She didn’t really believe in conjunctions or articles!! :P, about all those birthday’s celebrated at the stroke of twelve, all those crazy dances in the rain, all those night raids into every room for food when we slept hungry after the hostel dog also refused to eat the mess food, all those symposiums, all those culturals….

Just for one month, just one month can I please have my college and hostel life and all my friends back? Please?

That night as we had a marathon chat session by the time we looked at the watch the time was 4.30 and 7 tired souls went to bed, realizing that we had grown old and didn’t have the enthu which we had in college to talk late into the night and neither did our bodies and work schedules allow us the luxury of staying awake all night.

Sigh!! So operation Sunrise III though beautiful, left me in a kind of ambivalent mood, reminding me painfully of the passing years and the pathetically little that I have achieved in these years, and also reminding me of all the great moments and great friends I have.

Here’s to the groundnuts!! :)

You guys are the best!!

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)

Operation Sunrise - II and a perfect weekend :)

Read Part I of Operation Sunrise HERE

Sometimes in life there are moments which are so beautiful and perfect and their beauty is accentuated by the fact that they are so commonplace, so simple that you would miss them if u blinked. I had many such moments this weekend

Perfect moment 1: 2 o clock in the afternoon, four friends sitting in the theatre and watching dark knight, mouths wide open, eyes wide open and with one single thought in their mind. “Please please let Joker win at the end and batman can go take a hike”. Heath Ledger, I cannot understand what possessed you take your life after that absolutely mind blowing performance as joker in dark knight. Lets put a smile on that face!! Sigh!! Move over George(clooney), heath has my attention now.

Perfect moment 2: 6 o clock in the evening, three friends in a garment shop holding up a shirt, falling in love with it, trying it on, realizing that since they are errr horizontally challenged they cant get into it and looking wistfully at another girl who looks like she has a carrot for breakfast, cabbage for lunch and water for dinner reject the shirt because it is too big for her. Sighhhhh!!!

Perfect moment 3: 7 o clock in the evening two friends in odyssey, buying books left right and center without a care about the price tags (something which we have never done). Reason: errr. We were supposed to be buying books for my sister and she was paying for it. (ok Preethi. close that mouth of yours. i just spent some 2000 bucks of your money. you cant be angry with me for that?? *making shrek pussy cat eyes*)

Perfect Moment 4: 9 o clock in the night, five friends sitting in ascendas drawing a errr ummm graph writing in centre the name of the guys from college whom we liked as much as mallika sherwat likes clothes, china likes democracy and karunanidhi likes jayalalitha, and connecting their names to each other and giggling like a bunch of hyenas while commenting on the four losers sitting in our adjacent table who all had laptops open on their tables and were pretending to be really busy working. Further investigation told us that one of them was orkutting, another was chatting on yahoo and the others were errr watching pics not suitable for children under the age of 18!! :-\

Perfect Moment 5: 12 o clock in the night five friends watching re runs of Friends, laughing at Joey and the craziest of them screaming “Its twelve guys. Happy Friendship Day!!!” and all of them falling on top of each other in an attempt to wish each other happy friendship day.

Perfect Moment 6: 2 o clock in the morning five friends, one dressed in pajamas too tight for her, one dressed in pajamas too loose for her, another errr not very dressed, and the rest still wearing their dirty jeans and not changing out of sheer laziness, talking about extremely profound things like our single and happy status, about why XYZ and ABC who were going around were a not so perfect match and why PQR who told us about it and heard about it from LMN should probably tell EFG that she loves him but was EFG in turn in love with JKL who was broken hearted because UVW had ditched her and ended their relationship when college ended? And the sleepiest friend came up with the brilliant suggestion that maybe PQR wasn’t errr straight and liked people of the same gender!! :P

Perfect moment 7: 3 o clock in the morning, five friends in a dingy kitchen, one making maggi noodles and acting like she is making aloo gobi and butter naan, another one taking a video of her making maggi noodles and acting like she is PC sriram shooting a movie with the top hero and heroine in the industry, another taking an interview of her and acting like she is simi garewal interviewing tarla dalal, and the rest giggling like there is no tomorrow.

Perfect Moment 8: 5 o clock in the morning three sleepy heads falling over each other, one sleepy head complaining that she has to write a mock CAT and needs her intellectual sleep if not beauty sleep, one kozhupu edutha nai (errr. roughly translated as fat filled dog) who kicks the other four in unmentionable places to wake them up and says “Lets finish operation sunrise II. Lets go to the beach and watch the sunrise” and five friends stumble out of the house and walk to the beach to watch the sun rise over the bay of Bengal

Perfect Moment 9: 6 o clock in the morning five friends sitting on the beach, the waves touching their feet, not a word spoken between them, admiring the break of dawn something which we saw during the last operation sunrise an year and a half back and wishing the moment would freeze like that forever.

Perfect Moment 10: 6 o clock in the evening two friends at the beach surrounded by some acquaintances, looking at each other and asking “Where do we go for dinner”, both thinking for a minute, smiling and going “MIK” in unison. Errr. for the uninitiated MIK stands for Murugan Idly Kadai on besant nagar beach and if you haven’t had the butter onion utthapam and Sakkara pongal there you are missing out something big in life.

Is it plagiarism if you borrow a couple of lines from a friend and paste it on your blog??? Naaah. Its just called borrowing and never returning something which we guys have been doing for ages now!! ;)
So quoting Milinta from her post on THIS unforgettable weekend “Give me some memories, give me some laughter and give me some chatter. Or just give me my friends.”
Here’s to another successful Operation Sunrise, another great weekend and a great set of Friends!! :)