A Strange Weekend: (Barista, Bowling, an overcrowded Aerosmith concert, sutta, beer, styx, a college friend, getting approached by a guy & the safai)

Yes it was a weekend full of action. So many emotions, feeling and experience shrunk into a small window of time i.e. from Friday evening to Sunday late night that I can look back only in wonder.

Of late no work days has started to become a norm in my office. I am suppose to be in a team which has the most critical and taxing work in my office. But unfortunately and probably it’s because of the work our team has already done we are most of the time free. We were suppose to enjoy the fruits in the form of time which we now had. But hey it’s me and I got to have a different reaction to this situation also. To me this free time every day is annoying. I would rather prefer a taxing day to really appreciate the value of the time I am provided. To really cherish and utilize that time to the fullest I need to have a period in which I long for those times which I am unable to have. Now instead of utilizing the free time I have, I am rather killing it. I now feel that I have entered a vicious loop of waiting. As soon as I enter office I wait for the evening to arrive and when I finally get myself out of the office I wait for the next day. This cycle goes on and on and on and on.

Friday (2nd June) was no different. I was getting frustrated with the free time I had and was itching to get out as soon as possible. But the problem is that the group with which I generally move around on a weekday is distributed across different companies. How much I dislike waiting till 7 pm for everyone to assemble I cannot do away with it. Now our group comprises o few guys (the usual’s) and a girl. This was interesting, a girl in the group to which I belong. Now if you are thinking that somehow that poor creature happen to be in our group then you are thinking right. The circumstances were such that she belonged to the same team in which I am and because of that she and I happen to be in the set of people who go out sometimes. But the surprising part is that till now we haven’t managed to scare her away. It seems with age my skills of putting the fear of my presence into opposite sex is fading. In between I wonder sometimes to what length I can be self deprecating…hmmmm…..Well carrying on I want to bring out two set of thoughts from this great Barista time I had. Recently I bought (actually my friend got from US and I haven’t paid him back yet :) ) a digital camera. So more often than not I carry it with me and immortalize (hehe big word) the moments/gatherings into time by taking snaps. I thought it is a cool thing to do and it’s good that one can document various parties via the pictures I take. It has become a habit for me. Now the question which I want to put on floor for discussion is why girls hate getting snapped. I will never understand the chain of thoughts which made the girls feel so. If I try to look for a reason I am able to find only suggestions which gets me nowhere near to the explanation. Let’s ponder over a few of them. 1) The girl reads a lot of beauty magazine so as someone said if you read beauty magazine it will only make you feel ugly. 2) Some people simply hate getting snapped anytime and anywhere like celebrities :) 3) She is skeptical of the intention of the snapper (ahemmmmmm). She never knows what might happen with her pictures with news of morphing flying thick and fast. It makes we wonder where the concept of the trust has gone today. It’s a thought which cannot be overlooked but it will definitely pain a person accused of something like that if his/her intentions has never been that. But then again is their a solution to this problem. I would say the girl from the group belongs to 2nd category of girls rather that is what I want to think so as not to degrade myself even further (:)). The 2nd observation from this Barista chit chat was that if you belong to a group which has only 1 girl and you do not have the habit of having one in your group. The jokes get categorized into two categories. The first kind are those which can be said front of the whole group and the other which gets articulated in the subgroup which doesn’t include the female. So more often than not , in spite of all your conscious effort you tend to slip up. There will be times when someone or the other will flounder and barge out something which would have better remain unsaid. Once such thing is said one is at the mercy of the lady that how spirited is she.

So after barging out something or the other and taking potshots at each other better sense prevailed and we moved on to bowling. This is one of the games which I will never be able to appreciate. Who the hell invented this game and what for. You keep on throwing a ball which is heavier than it looks at the nine pins in front of you. More often you are more interested in getting rid of the ball as soon as possible so as to avoid crushing your own feet because you know that you are prone to goof ups. Moreover the ball seems to be its own master. It likes the gully so much that no matter what you do it always manage to avoid all the nine pins saying that ‘why are you so cruel Mr. Thrower that you want me to crush my brothers standing in a group of nine’. Passing this message it shows me the finger and happily strolls towards its destination only to come back again to haunt me with the same message. So the immediate question which arises is that why do I keep on frequenting amoeba(a game zone in Bangalore) for bowling. I can answer this question with another question then what the hell are we suppose to do in Bangalore. As if we have choices other than eating, drinking, watching movies and bowling. “Beggars are not Chooser” is the perfect quote for the situation I am trying to describe. But I think people go to bowling more to have a time in a group rather to compete. Of course some of my friends would disagree but I think it’s basically for the good times. My way to have a good time in a bowling alley is to watch other people reactions and observe that how happy they can be by just throwing a ball at the nine pins. Oh!!! if only somebody can confirm that they really feel happy and not just for the sake of it I would have recommended a bowling alley for all (:)). And of course in a group taking pot shots at each other anywhere and everywhere is a healthy way of enjoying yourself.

That was Friday the day which we will always be thankful for. Beginning of the Saturday (3rd June) was sober and serene. With my family members visiting me the next week most of the first half was spend in shopping and cleaning so that they may have a comfortable stay at what you can call a decent enough bachelor’s home (of course from my (a bachelor’s) view point). But all the effort was because I knew I was going for Aerosmith concert in the evening. Thanks to another friend that I was able to see this concert (you guessed it right he bought the tickets). So as to avoid all the work getting piled up till the last minute I was putting in all the effort. The experience of previous concerts had taught me enough to take the costliest ticket and not to be too early when the sun is shining bright. Getting inside the arena is an interesting story in itself. But before I tell you that story I would like to tell you that another of my friend came from Hyderabad that day. He came to give an exam(CFA) but I had corrupted him enough (from our talks on phone)to enthuse him to come to the concert. After his arrival he became skeptical on the chances of getting tickets at the venue. Let me tell you one thing if there is a concert in Bangalore and that too in Palace Ground their will always be tickets available at the venue. Unfortunately he took the wiser option and even I did not pester him much. A wiser options in the sense that who will have the energy to give an exam the next morning after a grueling international rock show. This proves I can be good and wise sometimes :) . My argument I did not pressed hard enough. Oh it feels good if you do something wise ;). Carrying on with our journey towards the arena. Now we were four guys going to the rock show. Hey this is me how can you expect a girl in the group (exception’s does not recur). Four guys and two bikes and the tickets were with the guys on other bike. So we started off towards our destination. Making our way through a heavy Bangalore traffic on a Saturday evening, towards Palace Grounds and that too on a concert day. A person living in Bangalore can imagine the harassment one is going to face because of the traffic. Now if we don’t know the route to palace grounds then one of us getting lost in the traffic (that too on a concert day where we were eager to reach) was something inevitable. So one friend and myself managed to reach the ground but the other bike behind was nowhere near to be seen. Nevertheless they managed to reach the venue half an hour after us. If you are thinking that it was not so bad then hold on. The series of unfortunate incidence does not end over here. Somehow and just somehow this concert managed to have two different entrances and we had to be on two different entrances with the other guys having the tickets. Irony was that the entrance we reached hardly had any crowd whereas the other entrance overflowing. Thankfully the notion which was developing due to us being on the hidden entrance, that only a fistful of people were coming to the concerts was undone by this realization. So we carried on with the only thing we were able to do that was to wait for the other guys to come to us for which they had to cross one entrance.At last but not the least after an hour or more of waiting the guys with tickets managed to reach us and all of us got into the arena. One thing to be noted in a concert of a famous band howsoever late you are you will always manage to get into the arena before the band comes up and play. Artists struggle for artistic freedom but what best could define that freedom than the power to make ten thousand or more people to wait for you for three long hours before you show up on stage. Hence the fact that Aerosmith were the celebrities got reaffirmed (as they were the last one in the arena to show up) in spite of the conspiracies cooked up by so called fate to make us the last. Inside a stand up concert there is a usual jostling for space especially if you have someone in the group who wants to see the concert from a point nearest to the stage. Following on the footstep of that person (rather the leader) we endured the usual push and pulls and the usual sneering comments in between, to reach a point from where their was no way further up. Fortunately when a concert starts people around you who are crossed with you because of you taking away their advantage point tend to forget and forgive your misadventure in the process of enjoying the show which is on. There is one thing good about a concert like that of Aerosmith-who play blue rock and have more love song(or rock numbers on the softer side) to their credit(at least in my country) then the hard core rock numbers. The thing which is good in a concert like theirs is that the number of beautiful girls who come to listen to them. So being surrounded by such beautiful creatures should give you a good feeling (:)). That’s what the normal thought process should be…Right??.. .With me their has to be a “BUT” which is always inevitable. It’s all right if you are surrounded by a group of creatures categorized as females. It’s all right if they jump around you and constantly keep on falling on you. But for a while …Yes my friends it feels good only for a while after that it becomes a headache. A simple person like me who in spite of having attended concerts before feels clueless on the way to behave under such situation. Then in a concert you get more interested in avoiding such collisions occurring due to reasons not under your control. To ensure that you do not get wrong notions about me let me explain a little further. Imagine that you are a person of short height and you are surrounded by ladies of various shape and sizes. Now if a girl of your height or smaller is their then you feel for her as she is facing the same problem as yourself. Still seeing her jump around with a spirit of her own makes you appreciate her and you try to give space to her so as to avoid any discomfort to her (heheh …what to do I try to behave as a gentleman…don’t you). Now consider another scenario in which you have girl of much greater height (bwaaah.. :() jumping around. She is so much engrossed in the things going around on the stage that she does not care what is happening around her. Now adding to the situation imagine she is just a little behind on the left and she manages to crush you with her you know what (:d). That’s a scenario under which different people will have different reaction but that was a situation which made me too uncomfortable. I don’t know whether I would mind getting into the same situation again but there is a level of discomfort and may be .. just may be…some of you may agree or some may not..any kind of comment from your side will be welcomed. Coming back to the concert which was electrifying as an Aerosmith concert should be. These bands know how to connect with their audience and make their presence felt when on stage. But one thing which they always manage to forget that they are playing in a different country where people will know only their popular songs and in one such song where the lead was expecting the audience to finish of his lines, he got pin drop silence instead. One grievance which most of the people had from this concert that they did not play few of their most popular songs like Crazy, Pink, Dude looks like a lady, Ja… got a gun, nevertheless for me their was one more band which I got to see and it was worth all the effort and pains which I along with my friends had to undergo. So the day ended with us eating at hotel empire, koramangala (probably the only place open at night in Bangalore) after failing to get a place at its church street branch. Reminiscing on the time we had and relishing the great food we were having we were just pondering over one thought that if..only if….metallica also comes to India…will their be shortage of tickets unlike all other international rock concert in Bangalore. All of us unanimously agreed that their will no place to stand in their concert.

That was Saturday ‘the concert day’ and then came the beautiful Sunday (4th June). The day my mission was to get my house in proper state so as to make it livable for my family members who were coming the next day for a week. Now if you have any kind of habit which you cannot do in front of your family member then the knowledge of being unable to do it in near future makes you overdo it. So I smoked and smoked and smoked (not more than a pack …don’t worry) along with the intense cleaning and shopping. After I have started earning I miss those shopping days when you had to work hard for things moreover to get things at cheap prices. These days with my purchasing power it’s more like just picking up things at my own whims and fancies. But this trip made of my family members gave me the opportunity to relive those days and I was happy to realize that you can still bargain and that too in a city like Bangalore. Another thing which took most of my Sunday was the so called ‘safai(cleaning)’. Even though we have a Bai to clean the house but she is different. We call her the SUPRA-BAI (distorted form of of super bai). She comes in the morning, more often than not she finds us sleeping, she watches, she does something and then goes away. We are generally amused and speculate did she ever come in the morning or are we recalling something that had occurred several days ago. Tweaking the metaphor a little ‘woh toofan ki tarah aaye aur aandhi ki tarah chale gaye’ rightly describes her short stay in our house. I can find layers of dust everywhere but who cares as long as no one visits us. Removing those layers and hiding the footprints of our(my) doing (the cigarette butts and the bottles) was tiresome; nevertheless the end result was good. So after a long days work guess what I needed. You guessed it right “the beer” and what better way to have a beer than to have with a college friend who also enjoys and appreciate heavy metal. The friend who had come from Hyderabad got over with his examination and our meeting point was fixed at Styx (a niche pub for heavy metal rockers). We were enjoying the ambience at styx to the fullest until a strange thing kept on recurring. What happened scared me a little (the next day of course that day I was too boozed to realize) but my friend took this opportunity to enjoy it to the fullest. A guy out of nowhere kept on coming to light my cigarette. Oh Man…I know I haven’t been able to get so called steady girl friend. But I never realized that this can happen with me, I never knew that one can get hit by guys on a harmless guys night out in pub. I can only pray that somebody save me from this big bad world. Thankfully my back was toward this guy (should I be thankful….ahemmm….) otherwise I would have run from the pub that very instant. My friend facing him was very sure of his intention and thankfully that guy was drunk enough for not troubling us in any other way except giving his services in the form of lighting my cigarette. Oh Man …. I can only cry out what did I ever do wrong. Anyways the night ended at my house with us recalling our great college days after an enjoyable rained journey back home.

That’s it folks that sums up the happenings of my crazy weekend. A weekend good enough to make me write about it so that I can look back and enjoy and I hope that you have also found out it to be interesting.