Au Revoir mon Paris.....

I am back to Bangalore after the onsite project manager's profit and loss projections showed that keeping me employed in Paris was more like rearing an elephant. So here I am back to saddi des after almost a year of fromage and bacon and petit fille. So after a year of sipping red wine and rushing away home from office as soon as the clock stuck 6:30 PM, I finally left the city of Paris behind me and on one fine Sunday I took the Lufthansa flight out of Charles de Gaulle Airport and flew back to the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Airport. So here is the story of my coming back. It all started one fine day, when after months of calculation and re-calculation, the project manager proclaimed that according to his calculations kicking me out of Paris was very very beneficial to the project. Unluckily for the guy who was giving me the news (read as my manager) came to know that even he was being kicked out of Paris because of the same reasons. My departure's decision taken, the next step was to book the flight. Not to be left in the bad books of miss lady luck since while flying to Paris I had only got a meagre 20kg baggage allowance on Air France, I booked my tickets early and explicitly mentioned the 30kg allowance at least 3 times in the travel request. Since destiny never made anything easy for me, the people who were assigned the task to book the tickets by the system happily forgot to book it for almost a week. Reminder mails and constant threatening finally got me a response and after calling up agents in 3 different cities I finally had my Lufthansa tickets to Kolkata and a connecting one to Bangalore after a week in my hometown.

The last few days in Paris just seemed to fly away. It was heavily invested in giving knowledge transfer to another guy in the project whom everyone calls Bappa. I guees no one even remembers his true name which incidentally is Basant. Well I guess the French as well as the Indians find it difficult to pronounce and hence they have stuck to the name Bappa for ages now. The KT as it is called in the IT terminology was the longest ever marathon KT that ever happened in the history of AL--as proclaimed by a few noble colleagues of mine. A farewell party at our veteran Indian restaurant called Namaste finally gave me the feeling that the 11 months in Paris were finally getting over. While I shopped a bit, I always wished that my dad was the customs official who would just let me pass by with the loot of perfumes and wines and chocolates. Alas nothing of that sort was going to happen and so I had to be contended with the few euros of shopping that I did.

Another notable thing that I did before coming back was that we went drinking to a pub that once upon a time Sayee and Aravind my two flatmates had once been to. Well actually we thought we were going but alas we never reached that place because both of them could not locate the place and finally after an hour of seeing every street and asking every suspicious police guy we gave up the futile search. The general consensus was that the pub could only be found when both were drunk. So after going through the futile exercise we decided to haunt our favourite pub on Latin quarter near Notre Dame. Alas when we went there, we found that the place had been converted a bit and ordering drinks alone was not on their cards anymore. So we necessarily had to order dinner which consisted mostly of cold duck meat and some herbs and bushes and a rice and curry thing (well seemed like curry). I still do not understand as to why the French love all their food so very cold and refrigerated. I guess it is something to do with their laziness that makes them go in for refrigerating and half cooking their cuisines. So along with the not so happening dinner me and Aravind gulped down at least a litre of long island iced tea. Well the others were happy mixing all kinds of beer together and waiting for a misadventure to happen. The bartender with whoom we were chitchatting with was saying all nice things about India and Indians. The guy seemed to have a nest on his head, if you remember Rudd Van Gulit from the world of soccer you might be able to relate. Finally the appreciations about India and Indians did not last long as Kostubh also known as Chota Chetan for his huge height got fully sloshed and emptied his entire stomach contents on the table. We cleaned it all up and bid adieu to that place with a fully sloshed Koustubh and caught the M4 and M1 back home. The ride was a total misadventure with people literally running away seeing Koustubh vomit over and over again. And after tripping twice in the platform of the metro station Koustubh proclaimed that he is not drunk at all. The night had some more adventures in store. After reaching home we gulped down a 2002 wine bought from Saint Emilion which had been lying around for such a special occassion. The night finally ended seeing Nilesh dance or rather jump to the tunes of marathi songs. Well considering his size it was more like watching an elephant shaking his body.

The last day in Paris was spent having lunch at a typical French restaurant and trying to order good wine and cheese. Last heard courtsey Abha Dawesar's book A summer in Paris, the ideal combination of wine and cheese on ones pallete might cause an orgasm. Alas did not happen to me. And considering the quality of wine and cheese and the price of it in India its not going to happen for a long long time. After the lunch filled with wine that left Basant talking all rubbish we walked all the way to Eiffel. From the Eiffel we took the river cruise on the Seine finally touching upon all those places and alleys on the river bank remembering every bit of time that I had spent photographing on the banks of that amazing river. The nostalgia of the last one year spent in that beautiful city came back to me. As the sun set to my last day in Paris, I did feel a tinge of sadness leaving this wonderful city with its Rues, its river banks and its structures and churches and colleagues who had become good friends in a span of one year. Night fell and John Denver again raised his score with All my bags are packed am ready to go.......am leaving on a jet plane....dont know when I will be back again......on my laptop. Its a song of leaving something dear and every year I have been singing this song over and over again leaving one city for another, one home for another. The ride to the airport in the dead of night in the taxi with its radio humming soft french numbers and known and unknown territories passing by was equally nostalgic. Even I was leaving on a jet plane and even I never knew when I would be back again to this wonderful city called Paris.

Since misadventures never seem to leave me, back in the aiport they were not able to print my connecting Frankfurt to Kolkata boarding pass. Moreover I was given a word of caution when my cabin baggage exceeded its requisite 7 kgs restriction (happens when you stuff it up with all kinds of cheap novels bought at second hand english book selling stores). Moreover I forgot to collect that very piece of luggage after the security check and realised it only after a good 10 minutes. Finally I managed to get the second boarding pass and found to my utter dismay that all my dreams of buying liqour were going to be thrashed away as the duty free shops were all closed. But luckily the shop opened up 5 minutes prior to boarding, and I finally managed to dash and rush and get a Bordeaux 2004 red wine. And if Deeghii is reading this I did bid farewell to Paris in the" Tata Bye Bye" way....As the Lufthansa flight taxied along the runway and the early rays of the sun painted the eastern sky with its vivid red, orange and purple colours I bid farewell to Paris for the last time. Then the flight gained altitude and passed above the cloud cover and the city of Paris was out of sight. 55 minutes later I was close to Frankfurt over a sea of clouds and the sun shining bright on my side of the plane and I saw another 3 on different sides circling around in invisible circles as we prepared to land. The sea of cloud beneath meant that Frankfurt would be very cloudy. It indeed is a great city to be in though the streets are as deserted as a public museum on weekdays. Frankfurt airport is the hub for Lufthansa, and if you ever saw a taxi stand full of cabs, the airport looks more like a taxi stand for Lufthansa. The logo of a bird on a blue and yellow background was everywhere to be sighted. The bus left us at a terminal from where I had to figure out which way to go for my connecting flight to Kolkata. A small gutten tag to an airport staff did the trick and I proceeded to see a whole set of guys sitting at the passport control eyeing everyone suspiciously. My French carte de sejour was enough for them to not even glance at me twice and soon I was officially out of the European Union. I headed straight for the duty free to buy another litre of alcohol, this time a whisky which my father had wished I would buy for him. I bought a litre of Jack Daniels and saw that my flight was a wee bit delayed. The two bottles of liquor had ensured that my hand luggage had gotten all the more bulky and hard to carry. With two bags of duty free stuff and a hand baggage and the laptop I was way too much loaded. Frankfurt airport at any point of time in the day especially the terminal 3 looks like an Indian airport. All major cities of India are connected by Lufthansa, well except for Bangalore on sundays which is operated by Air India, and as usual Air India known for its worser than Deccan record of flying on scheduled time was delayed by more than 15 hours. Imagine the plight of the people who were to travel in this god forbidden airline. Luckily for me our flight was just about 45 minutes late and as the time for departure I came, I proceeded towards security check, which was in every mood to strip me of my clothes to check for any signs of me being a terrorist. France never does indulge in so many checks. The passport control guys in Paris are more interested in chit chatting and once for a colleague of mine, they did not even stamp his passport. The excuse given was that, there was a huge queue and they did not want to waste much time checking up everyone. After the security check, the waiting area seemed to be straight out of the cafeteria of any Salt Lake sector V IT company. There were all kinds of IT people who had all descended from various parts of the world (well mostly US) to take the flight back to Kolkata. And just like in any cafeteria of any IT company everyone was busy voicing their opinion about everything, straight from the falling dollar affecting their way of living in the US, to who was getting married and who was trying for a shift and who belonged to IBM and who worked for TCS. This was the face of India, that was taking up all the possible jobs thanks to the world becoming more and more flatter (this is how we call offshoring in Infsoys). So after another half an hour of hearing all kinds of possible stuff like onsite allowance, the cold weather and the worsening market for Dot net professionals, there was a call for boarding. The flight was one of those huge airbuses, and I was allocated an aisle seat thanks to a very boaring Canadian man who seemed to be in his later 50s. The flight took off after another 20 mins, and as usual there was a huge thrust common for such huge airlines. One really feels the power of these rolls royce engines during such take offs and ladings. Once in the air above the cloud cover, and the captain having switched off the fasten your seat belt sign I ventured to the loo to freshen up a bit. Not sleeping for more than 24 hours now had taken its toll on my appearance. While coming back an old lady blurted out help-help and I realised that the lady's husband needed assistance. He wanted to go to the loo and could not stop talking all the way. In those 10 minutes he had told me why he was on the plane(he was visiting his younger daughter who was married off to some person in the US), that he had had two heart attacks and his older daughter was in Australia and she had a beautiful daughter who was a chartered accountant and almost my age, and that he carried a photograph of her which he wanted to show to me. Now this is where, I was shell shocked. The old man repeatedly called me his son and asked me for my parent's contacts. So the Paris tag had made me pretty much a marriageable element, I thought. The old man on his way back from the loo wanted me to fill up the immigration forms required for stepping into India. Seeing the alley was being blocked by the cabin crew distributing snacks, I told them that I would fill them later. After a snacks of peanut and wine I found old man selling the same concept of marrying off his grand daughter to a man seated on their side, well a bit older than me who was busy filling up old man and old lady's immigration form.

These nine hour flights are damn boring when you have sleeping men in their 50s sleeping on both sides of you. I tried watching friends on my laptop, flipped through the channels of Lufthansa, saw half of Nicholas Cage's National Treasure and felt very very bored. Everyone else seemed to be enjoying their afternoon siesta. Mr 50something Canadian had not even touched lunch for the love of snoring. Then it was again time for dinner as I saw the flight plan saying that we had entered India after crossing over from Pakistan. In 2 hours after a great meal of chicken fried with some rice and an aborted landing attempt at Kolkata thanks to a Spicejet flight not listening to ATC orders, we had reached the parking area of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International airport. After seeing the biggest of them like CDG, Heathrow, Schilpol, Frankfurt and Fumicino, the internation one 7 kms from my home looked so small in comparison. After the formalities with the passport control and getting a range of glances from the customs officials and saying repeated nos to the porters, I finally could retreive my luggage and was on my way out to see Ma and my sister waiting there. The first word they said was that I had grown lot fatter than the last time they had saw me. After all a year of cheese, wine, fries and burgers were showing its toll. A short ride back home through the streets of Kolkata, the streets that I had grown up on during my school days again welcomed me back to known settings and there in a wee bit small corner of my heart I missed the year long experience called Paris......

The naked dream.....

Was a dream this one...for someone special.....

Always wanted to see u get naked while u wore spects and smoked that cigarette in tht stylish manner.....

Love you.....

I heard in Paris and around.....

"Ca Va?"
"You know....the the the.....you know"
"Baith ke khaunga"
"What nansense"
"Just update"
"Sabji lane ja raha hai"
"Kaam to yaar tum kuch karte nahi ho"
"Bokhduuuuuuu" read this as Bordeaux
"Man-madrasa"
"Who is Suganya talking to?"
"Oh ji thand hai na woh haddiyon mein ghus jati hai.....badi kharab hai ji"
"Moniqueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.......Pascallllllllllllllllllllllllllll"
"Wolfgang"
"Sayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.......Swamiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii"
"Haan woh sab to thik hai but tell me one thing"

The inspiration comes from Saadibhasad (http://saadibhasad.blogspot.com/)

The new year as we welcomed it.......

And if you thought that the end of 2007 was joyous and filled with mega and gala plans to set the dance floor on fire since I am in the city of romance and fashion, think again. As far as I remember 31st december 2007 was spent infront of the computer at office with most of my French clients on extended vacations, while I was handling the query of one Pierre fellow who was atrocious because of some stupid issue. He first asked, then ordered, then threatened and finally abused me as morning became afternoon and finally evening and his issue was still not solved. Not my fault buddy if someday the connection of the ERP system of the entire company decides to fail. So finally Pierre was a happy man when his issue was solved. I think he had some kind of self imposed targets of getting over all work headaches before the new year sets in maybe also because the year-ending is on the 31st of December in these parts of the world. But when you consider that 90% of the population is outside the office enjoying vacations, you just ask why?

So after a torturous day at office, I headed home asking one and all to call me when they would be ready to leave office. Since given an option I always leave office the first, I was out of office as the clock struck 6 P.M. Later on the office guys decided to drop in at our place for a mini alcohol session and then as they say, what happened is history. It is also youtubed and as I write it the video has been viewed 51 times. Have a look here

The one trying to fly is the one and only Aby Paul, and the one behind him in the monkey cap, dancing just like an overgrown monkey is Sabya (the French among us Indians). And considering the fact that someone was trying to fly when it was almost yet another 3 hours to midnight and 2008, things really were creepy. By 9:45 Aby was history, he was sprawled on the dance floor from which he was trying to fly 45 minutes ago. And picking him up and trying to get him to drink butter milk with litres of lemon juice was really a Dard-e-disco experience. When Aby did not revive even after litres of buttermilk and lime juice we decided to let him be senseless and we headed outside for Champs de Elysee. The sight at Champs de Elysee was just like a Brigade Road of Bangalore or Park Street of Kolkata or C G Road of Ahmedabad. Things were just the same. There were people everywhere waiting for the new year to come along. Those who have the money or the contacts go to the gala parties, while others crowd the best known road expecting something( I do not know what till now) as the clock approaches 12. Since Champs de Elysee was way too crowded we decided to walk towards Eiffel. The temperature was dripping all the time and the weatherman had not been able to ward off the rain with his voodoo power. And when we reached the bridge on Porta Alma, the Eiffel lights started twinkling brightly and it was new year. We had expected some kind of firework spectacle, but the only ones visible were a few tarabatis (sparkles) and a few rockets that would have been hopeless competition when compared to Diwali. Anyway people were very happy about 2008 coming into their life, as Anirban became more grumpy because he had to go home. 2007 became 2008 but grumpy Anirban was still the same. Though, we had no such intentions of going back home, we finally realised that staying on Champ de Elysee was out of the question. By the time we had came back there, the riot police was all ready to use the baton. People had broken every kind of bottle on the street and it was utter chaos. Risking that 1st January 2008 could well have seen us nursing beatings from the riot police, we also headed back home.

Happy new year to one and all.....

Old Monk et Old Memories.....sponsored by Mohan Meakin

Finally after a long hiatus the login page of blogger suddenly did not turn into arcane french when I logged in to post this. But anyway, these days my french has improved drastically. Though I have no idea about what they pronounce and why on earth they eat up half the consonants while they speak but still if people write to me in French, I get a gist of what they are trying to communicate. The French's love for their language has a lot many times landed us lesser English speaking mortals into deep merde situations. So much so that my boss (happens to be an Australian) who learnt French the hard way by leaving Australia and settling in France for the sake of his French girlfriend fully empathised with us and made our signature in official emails read out that, All correspondance with us lesser mortal english speaking group should be in English (the template is in french and english). Ocassionally the mails are one line long but the signature is usally 5 lines long to accomodate all such instructions. Yet people prefer sending us a hell lot of communication in arcane french that I have finally managed to pick up helped by another spectacular tool from the house of google, their translation tool. I tell you one day in the near future, they will surely be the China of the virtual world. As in today's world any product that you pick out of a shelf in your nearby retail store has a tiny weeny microscopic "Made in China" label, in a similar way every tool that we use in the virtual world would soon have a Made by Google label. Now can anyone of you at Gartner or Forrester who ever manages to pass through my blog and read uptil this point please offer me a job of some kind for giving such a wonderful analysis on the prospects of Google? And yah hey if you guys out at google are reading this, VP HR types, senior manager HR, manager HR, trainee HR or for that matter even the admin guy or the guy who cleans the floor of Google.....anybody.....just inform me if there is some job for writing such wonderful things. Now starts the long wait for a flashy career ahead ;-)

Speaking of other inane and mundane things in life, that Saturday night/Sunday early morning post was under the effect of a deep intoxication caused by the burnt variant of malt whiskey, namely black rum. The person responsible for this deep source of intoxication was the one and only Chintu Parikh. The person had somehow procured maybe even smuggled a bottle of Old Monk from India to London and was bragging about the same by putting up a status message on his Gtalk (see I told you how Google is solowly ruling the virtual world) which read like "Khub jamega rang jab mil baithenge teen yaar....aap main aur old monk". Alas that aap could have been me had UK not been seperated from mainland Europe by the cold and wild English Channel and the very petulant immigration officers at the border. The last time they actually checked my schengen visa with all sorts of magnifying glasses that watch repairers wear to see the anatomy of watches. So Chintu Parikh sitting there in some remote part of London made me nostalgic about the precious black rum. The magic of black rum has never failed to smite any soul who has ever stayed in a hostel during the formative years of life. The advantages of black rum leaves its charm on every soul dying for some alcohol in their blood stream. Firstly it is one of the cheapest varities of alcohol available in the local daru ki dukaan. In terms of alcohol it has a high 40% content and hence you dont feel cheated to spend some penny on alcohol. It helps in getting the body warm in the cold and of course you never get a hangover the next day, so even if you have a presentation or an exam the next day, its not screwed at all. Before IMT, drinking used to be a one off incident in the dry state of Gujarat. Bootleggers never made it easy for us to procure it with their exhorbitant premium pricing models. So rum was not the thing that was ever favoured. The choice was more obvioulsy whisky. I still remember the one time in ahmedabad at a friend's place, someone got so drunk that he slept a considerable amount of the night on the bathroom floor. The charm of drinking black rum especially the one christened Old Monk started for me in Ghaziabad during the IMT days. Coupled with the fact that Mohan Meakin had its manufacturing base in Ghaziabad and that any other brand in the market not bottled in UP was exhorbitantly priced made Old Monk an obvious choice for us not so rich kids. I never was a regular smoker in college, but the once in a while factor made the crow of the college give me a new name called Page 3 smoker. A smoke in hand with a glass of old monk mixed with Coke in the other, singing away to glory on the terrace of the canteen block are the vivid memories that are left of the last few days at IMT. After the college days the next time black rum flowed like water was in Hyderabad during the induction programme of the company I got placed. Alas since the company thinks that drinking is almost equivalent to sin the scene was shifted to the hotel where we had been put up, a shady hotel with a faulty AC system that had not worked for almost decades. Incidentally Chintu Parikh was a part of this drinking group and as is his specialty, he had invited the whole world to drink. It was over here that I got acquainted with a guy Abhishek Deb. At first look he looked like a complete football but as time passed we became good friends. After that the black rum story in my life drew to a complete halt with more amount of disposable income at hand with thanks to a good package made the preference curve shift from the black to the white variety. It had more to do with Sumit Baheti's re-entry in my life. We had been friends since class 11 and had gone to the same physics tuition, the teacher was a bearded guy who was morbidly scared of his fat wife. The kid they had was a total brat. And last but not the least the bearded man had predicted that our future would be doomed had we not given him enough moolah to secure a seat in BIT Mesra where he apparently went to teach. So sharing the same doomed future over two years we had celebrated every such occasion in those olden long lost days by creating world records in gobbling up fuchkas. For the lesser informed its the same as gol gappa of Delhi and the pani puri of Mumbai sans the pudina minced water. We in Eastern India prefer the tamarind minced water. But all these records came with a lot of effort and our stomachs did have to go on an overdrive trying to digest some 40 fuchkas at one go. In Bangalore the fuchkas gave way to more dangerous things like white rum. And as predicted we were still celebrating a doomed career as was predicted by the wife fearing bearded guy. While Sumit had landed himself up in a competing IT services company as compared to mine, he was confused as to why on earth even his onsite location was Bangalore and why he slogged all weekends. While I was confused about what I was doing in an IT company. My only sojourn with IT was restricted to flunking a few basic papers way back in school followed by copying out of notes in the diploma exam and getting mass laddoos in assignments for the two IT subjects that we studied in our MBA course. Drinking was as regular a feature in Bangalore as washing clothes (once every weekend). The inclusion of Banner (oh boy he would surely kill me if he saw this) saw the per capita beer consumption of Bangalore reaching record highs. The presence of Banner in the pub hopping gang always ensured that me and Sumit set up self imposed curfews on our intake. Banner would reach new highs every time, and it is a known fact that a drunk Banner is more dangerous than an insane military dictator who has suddenly declared emergency. So whenever Banner was not there to accompany us to the usual hangout on Church Street called New Night Watchman(thanks to its cheaper prices) me and Sumit used to nurse a hangover over our doomed careers on the next day. Well it is a separate story that an intoxicated state coupled with some petulant neighbors had resulted in memories worth keeping for a lifetime. The outcome was that three souls had landed up in the lockup of the nearby police station for no apparent reason. Back now in the present day Paris, Chintu's status message had brought back memories of the charm of black rum and a dying need to get drunk with rum. Me and Aravind had to rush to the nearest store to see if we could get our hands on a bottle of the same. We apparently realised that the mini shop that we visit for emergencies (supplies) doesnt even store alcohol. It was quite a shocker and so we had to run to an almost shut down Monoprix and come out with a 10 euro bottle of exquisite black rum ( a brand that I have completely no idea of at the present moment) . What followed afterwards are mere figments of imagination and reality coupled and intertwined. After 5 drinks the old man of the house was no more singing, he was rather shouting songs. The guy who will any day give a competition to Dagwood of Blondies for being flat on the couch for 24 hours had opened the glass shutters and was romancing the nipping, below zero temperatures of Paris and I was busy writing the stupid blog below this and throwing up some words of emotional support to a friend on gtalk who had suddenly had a major breakup. Though it all sounded so bull and I was not even sure what I was doing, I guess I did a great advice session under alcohol. And then everything went black and as I drifted away to sleep I could just hear a voice saying arey bho..... ke....u r sleeping on the floor between the two sofas. Then everything turned into a kaleidoscope for a split second and it was all dark after that.

After a few pegs of rum......

I havent done this for a long long time. The last time as far as I remember, it was the one and only famous party that we had at IMT after the disgusting financial services paper in the 4th semester that turned out to be the most disgraceful performance in my life. It was one of those papers which was an open book paper and we had no clues what we were supposed to reproduce in our papers. Apart from our lesser mortals who had the audacity of taking up finance as our majors in a college like IMT, there were others who thought that the financial services was one paper that could give them a well deserved placement in the financial services thanks to the boom in the banking and insurance sector. Alas they never expected that the whole end term exam would just consist of one question with a 100 twists and turns. Man it was worth a sight when we all came out of the exam hall with a big question mark written stark on their face. Though it was an open book exam people had this one question all over their worried face, was it a pass or fail? Alas we all knew the outcome, even if it was an open book exams which we long craved for. The toppers were obviously trying to find out the %age difference in their scores while us lesser mortals had headed towards Noida to celebrate the disgusting performance in the FS paper. And lo in the middle of these celebrations I did get some 5-6 calls from the topper of our claass threatening me to complete the strategy project. Poor thing she never had any idea that I wanted to get so very drunk that strategic management seemed as arcane as nuclear physics. Today I am as drunk as that day in the hostels of IMT, when we drank and Arti shopped to feel better. Today she is married and enjoying a life away from financial services and neither do I care about financial services in this world of Interface monitoring in the SAP world. It seems to be a far off world than where we wanted to land ourselves at. But still everyone has survived with a little bit of gloom here and there. But at the end we are what we are. MBA seems to be a far off dream that we managed to indulge in. Alas no more of it survives in real, it is what survives in our sweet nice dreams. But what really remains is this sense of intoxication that makes u ponder about the way your life is taking. After all that perspective changes with time. When u consider that Sumit Baheti was drinking vodka yesterday, I must say that life has chaned a lot. There were times when we had resolved never to drink vodka. And today things have changed. Even six moths is a long time. Today Baheti is indulging himself in litres of vodka. Alas there were days when even 250 ml of vodka would have made us puke. Alas things change, we change, preference change. Time changes every soul in us. If only we could have made time stand still....life might have been a better place to live.......alas never would happen.....

Much ado about cleaning

I finally had the august opportunity to meet the person for whose welcome our house in Paris saw four well fed, pot bellied persons making war like arrangements for a whole of two days in an attempt to clean up all the mess that the flat in Courbevoie housed apart from the four people in question. It was the day of all days that usually comes once a month but for the last two months I had avoided the D-day by rushing away to neighbouring countries when the day came. Considering the fact, that the D-day beaches are very nearby when you consider my geographical location on the map of the world, I had every plans to rush off to the D-day beaches when these once in a month occassions came, but since it was clear that I would most probably be threatened with dire circumstances if I avoided it another time I finally decided to act and clean the house for the grand arrival of our landlord. It has been months since I shifted from the Indian hostel to this appartment with three of my colleagues, in a vain attempt to save some money. Alas I have spent everything on travelling Europe and presently my bank balance looks very much disbalanced. The day I moved into this appartment the smell of gross neglect welcomed me. A sight of the dining table was enough to give the landlord a massive heart attack. There was everything on the table and it looked like the sight of a mini explosion. Bottles and cans of used pickles and sauces were there. There was even a carboard case that was home to a shoe once upon a time. Now it was home to a whole host of masalas that were last used a decade ago. Though I do like my stuffs to be clean and my room to be tidy, cleaning up a community mess is not something which I am used to. The table was left the way it was lest it again decide to explode on me.

Historically I have been blessed with flatmates or hostel roommates who have had dubious records of being clean. Notable is the wonderful time that I had with the great Banner. Room number B-57 in IMT hostel was one of the smallest rooms that could accomodate two people. To meet the problem of space we had joined our two beds and hence were crowned as the undisputed presidents of some well known society of IMT which is best kept secret in a public forum like this. The space constraint problem saw clothes being heaped on the lonesome chair in the room. The chair seemed to be heaped in the same way as a donkey's back when being taken to the dhobi ghat. Books used to be lying here and there on the bed as were newspapers on which we sometimes slept too. These newspapers were hurriedly disposed under the cot to rest in peace with all the dirt of the world. And then once in a while came a frantic SOS call from the great Banner announcing the arrival of his parents. A call like this meant something much more graver than 9/11 for us because if his parents would have seen the condition of our room, the way we kept it, we would both have been shot dead at point blank for being so unclean. The SOS meant I had to run and push every item of clothing inside the big almirah and lock it up. If they would have opened the almirah once, they would have been buried under debries of fallin clothes of all kinds. The next step was to shove everything under the bed and if still unwanted things remained they would be pushed into the neigbours room. Equally unclean the duo of Bindra and Sohar never minded an intrusion into their room. Bindra's cleanliness record had the whole cleaning staff of IMT prying for his blood. He had happily forgot to clean a bucketfull of clothes that he had soaked in soap for more than a month. When he finally threw them all away, it was anybody's guess how many lesser mortals might have died of the stench. The next phase of room cleaning would be the jharu pocha wala stage with me struggling with the jharu and Banner doing the pocha. The speed at which we cleaned the room would definitely have put a high speed TGV at shame. The finishing touches were provided by lighting up a whole plethora of incensce sticks in an effort to shoo away the smell of stale cigarette smoke that lingered on in our room. The wallpapers of our PCs changed from a raunchy Monica Belluci staring at us to a picture of godess Saraswati in no time. And this is how I had saved my ass for a whole year and had managed reasonably well to portray myself to be a clean person to the outside world. Second year in IMT, was an individual affair, with people getting single rooms. I had managed to keep my room clean for the better part of that year and thanks to a lot of initatives taken at the begging of the year of putting up wall hangings and fancy lamp shades nobody ever raised eyebrows. Though in second year also a mount everest of old newspapers rested under my cot. In the latter part of the second year, we stuffed the mountain in Akshara's car and took it to the local kabadiwala and made a mini fortune of it. The money was enough to sposor a booze party for our group of friends. The next stop which became home for a few months was the guest house of Infosys during the training period at Hyderabad. All our combined efforts of keeping everything out of place proved futile by the constant monitoring of the housekeeping staff of the guest house. Bangalore also saw its share of dirtiness thanks to the laziness of us few souls who stayed in a house at BTM layout. The only saving grace was the cleaning woman who did not understand even one word we spoke and vice versa. It was easier to talk to an alien than the cleaning woman, but she did clean the premises and clothes of ours quite well. And now in Paris, cleaning the home is a ploy to keep the owner happy, lest he throws us out of the house into the cold streets of Paris in a winter month. The regularity of cleaning stays in sync with his regularity of coming to collect the rent. That means once in a month the house gets a full revamp with four hatta gatta naujawan becoming the opressed Cinderella taking up the mop and bucket and going around the house cleaning, mopping, strugling, falling and freeing everything of dust and stains including the table that looked like an explosion site. Finally after hours of fighting with the dust and stain and emptying a bottle of stain remover the house looked habitable and sophisticated including the table which no more looked like a blast site of age old curries. Expecting the owner to go ga-ga over our cleanliness initatives but when he came he talked about complex things his bank was doing in a french accented hindi. Later on he started talking about how he desperately wants to learn SAP, a skill that I havent been able to learn in so many years even after sitting infront of the SAP interface every single day. So if you want a clean up of ur house, u know whom not to invite. I am better at cleaning up entries from database these days.