F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

When you see a heading like that you would know for sure that I am going to talk about friends or may be friendship in general. Well, for once, you ought to get your knuckles cracked for this wrong guess :). No, I am not going to be talking about my friends but, for a change, I want to mention the different types of friends I have.

I come across a lot of people every day and have been doing so for the past 23 conscious years of mu life. When I meet people, there is a natural filtering process that runs within me which picks people I would want to meet again and be friends with. My choice is what I call it and it’s a need based choice. I don’t have a zillion friends and to be very honest I don’t think all my facebook or orkut contacts are my DEAREST friends, but there are some hand-picked earthlings, filtered by need and type.

There are friends whom I need when I am happy or when I want to have fun. These constitute “the gang”. These are people whom I feel are pretty happy themselves. The beautiful people, the funny people, the beautiful and funny people (that’s a rarity thou....).

Then there are the social friends. The term “social” has one and only one definition here, the “social drinkers”. These are the gang also called as the “Friday Friends”. These are the people who call me only during fridays or whom I call only during fridays (that’s the party time...:)), dutch the drinks, and forget each other the next morning, only to remember again next Friday :).

This next category may sound a li’l unusual to you and would lead you to think that I’m trying to blow my own horns here, but I’ve had a category of friends called as the “fan friends”. They pose as your biggest fans while you’re on a roll. They love absolutely anything you say or do. Yes, I’ve had such friends too , but then, they are far and few and never stay long. :)

Then there is this category of beautiful women, who are nothing but beautiful and... beautiful only. This, to my knowledge and experience so far has been the rarest category of friends I’ve had. They are the “arm candy”.

Arm Candies apart, there are the good women. By good I mean, good to me. The women who would sit next to me and listen to my endless sad stories of life... :). They are more of a shoulder to cry on than anything else. These women friends, I am whole-heartedly grateful to for having tolerated me.

And at the end of it all, there are people, who fall into most or all of these groups and are the best things to have happened to me in my life. Men and women alike, who have had an impact in my life in one way or another, whom I have learnt from, whom I have shared with, whom I have laughed and cried with. For all of you, I am blessed that I have you in my life.

But hey, I’m not claiming that this is where the list ends. I have a long way to go, a long and interesting life to live, lots of people to meet and lots and lots to friends to make. So the list shall grow and praying so, God Bless..!!

The Red Rainbow

Outings during weekends are always a pleasant way of switching yourself off from the monotonous home-to-work-to-home routine and if such an outing is to the beautiful arms of nature then there could be nothing better. I want to tell you about one such outing last week with a couple of my colleagues and their gang of friends. Yes!! For once, I was out with people whom I was meeting for the first time, but whatever.

Sharan, my colleague was the father of the plan and Ravi a.k.a Chotu was my instigator. And since I hadn’t had much going my way for a long time, I decided that it was time for a break. So, it was set. We were headed off to Red Hills, Ooty. The gang would be nine souls counting Chotu, his friends Himachal a.k.a Boka and Anand, Sharan, Sharan’s better half Seema, her younger sister Siri and a couple of Siri’s friends and of course yours truly. We were divided into 2 cars, Ravi’s Swift (the auto) and Anand’s Honda City.

Friday late evening was when we started from Bangalore. Our plan was to reach Bandipur if we could, and halt there for the night. But, as the Indian Standard Time mentality goes with us Indians, we had a late start and thus, only managed to reach Mysore and that too by midnight, after a dinner halt at a pathetic highway-side restaurant (no one would dare beg to differ on this one...). So Mysore it was for us for the night and the bad part was to find a place for us to stay and with ladies accompanying, we invariably had to find a sane place to put up. Having loafed around the city for some time and having realised that it was gonne be difficult to find a place by ourselves, we let the ever good Samaritan (the auto-fella, and I hope you got the sarcasm intended here :)) help us out for a meagre 20 bucks. Eventually having found a place by very late midnight, we decided it was time to crash since we had to be up early next morning.

Saturday early morning we started off for Ooty and after another couple of pit-stops for breakfast and tea, we were, in the small yet bustling town of Ooty. With the weekend stepped in, the town, as forever, was packed with tourists, crazed to see the botanical garden and the lake and the what not.

Red Hills, the place we were to visit is a home-stay, around 30 kms from Ooty, over a lot of hairpin bends, up-hill and down-hill. As I said earlier, if you are surrendering yourself into the arms of nature, there is nothing better and I realised and made up my mind for precisely that as soon as I set my foot on the premise of the Red Hills home stay. Let me just give you a heart-to-eye description of the place. The home stay was on the peak of a small hill, adorned with a beautiful lawn fenced with all kinds of flowers. I am not very good at flower names so I ll just go with red, blue, orange or dare I say, a rainbow of flowers. At the edge of the garden was a view point from where you could see the beauty with bare eyes, the transcendental beauty, yes... it would blow one’s senses and it did mine, the valley, the beautiful tea gardens, the lake and the hills nearby and to top it all, the climate which was cool, cloudy and breezy. I couldn’t have asked for more, but surprised I was to know that there was more waiting for me.

We checked into our room, a beautiful singe bed-room wid a fire place, very romantic, but sadly not one I could relate to :(. I thought the room was gonne be not just small but impossible for the 9 of us and then and there was my first surprise. There were 3 tents waiting for us in the backyard lawn, and to my experience the best tents I have seen. Rain-protected, neat, spacious for 2, beds, pillows and big warm blankets. Wowy..!! With that settled, it was time for my next surprise. We, the 9 hungry poor Indians were greeted with a class-apart lunch. It wasn’t five-star or seven-course, but was way better than all that. Good, normal and very yummy home cooked food.

I hogged on the food as if I hadn’t eaten for days together, and why just me, everyone else did too. Chotu had gone nuts. We suddenly realised that there was after all a dog in Chotu waiting to be let out at the sheer sight of good food. :). Post lunch, there was one and only one thing to do, take a power nap. After an hour of sound sleep in the tent I was woken up by the sound of rain drops crashing against the roof of my tent. Yes.. as they say in Hindi, “Sone pe Suhaga”.. I was being treated like the blessed child of nature. There was a light drizzle in the evening which made it look like a beautiful feminine form, just out of a shower, all wet and extremely seductive and to top it, we were greeted with some great coffee. To tell you, things were just getting better for me.

We dint have any plans for that evening since it was getting to twilight soon. So we just roamed around the home stay and in the lawn playing badminton and sitting at the view point just cherishing the beauty in front of us. I did try my hand at badminton though, but failed embarrassingly miserably. So I just let others play and I decided to spend some quality time at the view point by myself soaking the moment. With the light fading off the sky soon, there was my next surprise. Well, I wouldn’t call this a surprise exactly but the way it turned out eventually was the kick of the evening. We had a bonfire getting ready for us and as the night zoomed in and a slight chill set in, the bonfire lit in all grace. But this moment was short-lived as we were pushed indoors by rains.

With the rains playing the spoil sport on the bonfire, we decided not to let our spirits down and so started the party. Drinks were served and with that were served a content dose of absolute thrash-talk. Here entered the “for-so-long-out-of-picture” souls, Boka, Seema, Sharan, Siri, Poornima and Abhi. Boy, did I have a good time listening and laughing at their utterly non-sensical yet very entertaining thrash talk. I can’t tell you what all I blabbered coz I don’t have a frikkin clue of that. :). After a lot of pegs, we decided to huddle in one of the tents. One tent, a single torch light, and 9 sloshed souls inside. What transpired in there was probably my best experience of a huddle. We played games that made no sense and talked about stuff that we dint have any clue about and eventually bid adios to each other for the night and crashed.

Sunday morning, I had to wake up early, for I wasn’t gonne miss the view at dawn from the view point for anything. After a simple yet sumptuous breakfast, we decided to go for a small trek, to the peak of the nearest hill. What started as a small trek eventually turned out to be a tiring climb to the top of the hill. We had just trekked a couple of hundred metres when to everyone’s surprise, our 4 feet 8 inch muscle man Chotu nearly collapsed out of fatigue. His vocal abilities gave up for like a minute (the only minute in the whole trip that the bugger was quiet..). Once Chotu was back to normal, we resumed the trek, slow but steady, pausing at regular intervals, since Sharan and wifey were getting unusually romantic with Sharan virtually picking every single flower on the way and decorating it on his wifey’s hair, which had started to look like some kinda flower vase now :).

The peak was nothing like I had ever seen before in my life. We could see our home stay from the top and it was ant-like. So tiny. I realised then the enormity of things around me and that I was just a small and insignificant creature, a pawn in the hands of a superior power. It was a moment of epiphany. So beautiful, so magnificent..!!

After relishing the climb to the peak and the view there at, we trekked down in half the time, since we had already digested all the breakfast during the course of the tiring trek and were getting increasingly hungry. Back to the home stay, we once again hogged on the yummy lunch that greeted us and after that we cleaned up, packed up and signed off from Red Hills.

Now back to my home-to-work-to-home routine, I am sure that this trip has been a truly refreshing and a jolly-good, fun-filled experience for me. And for everyone whom I joined on this trip, a BIG THANKS and GOD BLESS !!