Me, myself, Kolkata & Irene

And before I am publicly hanged for not acknowledging contributions to my blog from the selected few people who visit and read my blog and digest the insanities I write without even having second thoughts about suffering from literary indigestion (last heard this group consisted of as few people as hair on Anupam Kher's ever shining head), here is a sincere thank you to Akshara for providing me with the photo of Manish and me in the post Livin la Vida Loca. Considering the fact that me and Manish were sworn enemies at IMT and were in a habit of showing our immense love for each other by painting each other's doors with obscenities and locking each other up, the civilized photo is very hard to beleive.

Coming back to more mundane things happening in life, I have sworn not to take such long breaks from work and go back home because the work load that welcomes you back to office looks like a mini Mount Everst that has to be climbed in a record time without the necessary supply of oxygen. So for the last two days I have been tackling issue after issue at my workplace till late at night to get things back on track. Sadly, the Kolkata chromosomes have again been buried under the more dominant Bangalore chromosomes for the moment, but 10 days in the "City of Joy" was worth every bit of it. The crusade started with the cab driver honking his horn 20 minutes earlier than the scheduled time he had been asked to come at to drop me off at the airport somewhere in between the hours of 0430 and 0500 on the 1st of march. For a change Air Deccan's flight took off at the right time for Kolkata though it is a seperate story that their reservation systems software had failed and they were being forced to issue hand written boarding passes, and secondly they never seemed to have any cabin baggage tags of their own and were distributing Jet's and Kingfisher's baggage tags for the CISF to stamp its approval of not carrying a bomb on. I slept through the journey fretting about the fact that I had again been unlucky enough not to have a beauty queen sitting on the seat beside me, though it also gave me the opportunity to stretch myself onto the seat beside me which had remained empty and not crib about leg space. Kolkata was in its full glory welcoming me with the ever so predictable depression caused by some low pressure over Bay of Bengal which saw me and Kolkata both getting dranged but spirits still lighted up. But later on even the weather decided to become cheerful and leave me nothing to complaint about.

So there I was on an overdrive meeting up long lost and new friends over cups of coffee and granita at either of Barista and CCD shelling out money that I am sure is going to show up in the revenue-expense statements of these companies as an abberation for the first 15 days of March. It also saw me watching 4 movies in a matter of 10 days. The Bangalore way of living has somehow made me accustomed to the fact that any movie of any length on any day at any hall would make your pocket lighter by a minimum of Rs.150. It felt really odd shelling out only Rs.40 in the decent non-multiplex kind of cinema halls of Kolkata. And there was mom who was in every mood to triple my calorie intake on the pretext that I would not get good Bengali food once I land up in Paris in April. Taking cue from her other relatives also got into the overdrive thinking it to be their moral responsiblity to stuff my stomach with Ilish Mach, Kosha Mangsho, Polao and Roshogolla. Needless to say that my stomach was in every mood to revolt against the onslaught of food items the same way as the BSF reacts when it sees Bangladeshi's crossing the border. A lot of Pudin Haras and Diegenes saw me not falling prey to the hands of the stomach devil and survive.

And finally Kolkata was also about meeting Irene, a pretty woman who seemed to be in every mood to file a chargesheet against me in the Dum Dum police station when I forgot to wish her "Happy Women's Day". In reports coming straight from the horse's mouth meeting me was one of the craziest things she had done in a long long time because of the fact that we had been acquainted through the orkut platform. So I guess I must also be thankful to Larry Page and Sergey Brin and all the Silicon Valley VCs who invested in orkut and had faith about its potential of reaching out to people. And she wore earrings that looked much like the Olympic rings and were big enough for a mouse to leap through them but jokes apart it was a fun time that we had that evening discussing how the Eco Times gets its form (a magazine the sight of which at one point of time irritated me before the MBA days), about books and the significance of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nation in her life and coffee in general.

I guess my Kolkata chromosomes had mutated way too much and that is what had my mom and sister talking about bundling me back to Bangalore again considering the insanities I was showing. But I finally was able to get the computer fixed after repeated reminders from mom which finally had turned into threats. It was tough considering that the guy who was supposed to give a rebirth to the dead as a dodo PC seemed more busy than the PM of the country. And finally the 10 days of ecstacy drifted to an end with me feeling a bit low about getting back to Bangalore and start off the drill again, but guess what?? I got lucky this time through. Finally lady luck smiled on me as for the first time in my life I had a cute thing sitting down right beside me on the Air Deccan flight back to Bangalore. And as usual the Bangalore autowalas gave a warm welcome by ripping me off a lot of money for the journey back to the rented place which I call home.