Ladies, gentlemen and gentle men,
I dedicate this post to say sorry, be repentant, show regret & offer my apologies towards my sudden disappearing act. Having done that, I would now like to touch upon the cause of my absence.
To tell you the truth, the last few weeks have been, as I may put it, an out-of-suitcase experience for me. Days of scheming, loads of buttering, a few threatening emails and one hostage scenario later, my boss finally agreed to send me to a much awaited trip to Poland.
The trip was in many ways a memorable experience and unlike my other business trips, for some good reasons as well.
Apart from the fact that my luggage or I wasn't lost in transit, the hotel which I was put in was kind of classy and 4 starish. To give you an idea, it was one of those places where you could easily get intimidated by the housekeeping staff. My room in particular had perhaps the best view of all, as its windows gave way to a high definition view of the swimming pool and the sauna room.
Such was the charm of the place that I couldn’t help but pick a few travel souvenirs which mainly consisted of half a dozen shampoo bottles, a pair of bathroom slippers, the tv remote, some silverware and the hair dryer by the time I checked out.
Things turned out to be very bright and productive on the work front as well. Though the office floor starkly reminded of the one here in Mumbai, the people were of a pleasing nature and most spoke good Pinglish (Polish + English) as well. Prior to a minor accident at the pantry involving me and some of the equipment, which ultimately rendered the coffee vending machine useless, my presence on the floor usually attracted welcoming smiles and an occasional 'Namasthey!' as well.
My escort, who also happened to be my counterpart at work and a die hard Bollywood fan, was kind enough to show me some interesting places in & around Krakow. Thanks to some vicious rumours doing rounds in emails across the Indo-Polish borders, Marcin insisted that I must sing a Bollywood song and mimic Shahrukh Khan. It was only when I actually relented to his demands did he learn that I wasn't really known for such talents.
Otherwise, our guys day out together was largely enjoyable and fun. Perhaps, if I only hadn't got carried away by his 'Krakow looks best on foot!' advice, I would have saved myself a walking marathon and my legs from cramping under the coach class seat on my return flight. Now I am counting days before he gets to visit Mumbai and I put forth a 'Mumbai looks best in local trains, at peak hours!' offer before him. Ha! 8-)
To put it in a nut shell, my maiden trip to the land of vodkas, chocolates and vodka filled chocolate was a memorable experience by all possible means. Now since that I am pretty much back to where I truly belong, I promise to pick from where I had left and continue posting my blogs with no major leakages.
Till the next blog... take care and god bless! :)
PS: For those wondering what caused me to use something that resembles a phrase from a Harry Potter book as the title for this post... 'Przepraszam, jestem za późno!' means 'I am sorry, I am late!' in Polish. :)
4/14/09
1996
Standard Seven, in my opinion (Also proven by a kick-ass scientific study. Sacchi, meine padha hain), is the most challenging year in a student’s life. The reasons, as I will soon put forth, are a handful. Let’s start by looking at what happens on the ‘educational’ front.
Normally, anyone who has ever bothered to check the syllabus when s/he entered standard seven must have at least for once played with the thought of exterminating the author and his next five generations. If you ask me, I think such a thought process comes pretty naturally to anyone who 1) happens to share my levels of interest in anything remotely scholastic, 2) hero worships the Chainsaw Massacre guy and owns a pet python or 3) both.
Thus, unless you were immune to all forms of pain or happened to drool over things like empirical formulae and the Pythagoras Theorem, you too will probably recollect going "Photo what frigging synthesis?!!" when you first turned the pages of your syllabi, seventh standard and every standard.
The second and perhaps the most important point is the fact that by the time you reach standard seven and happen to be a guy, the world seems to be a lot lesser nice place to live in.
Apart from the thing with the hormones that is constantly playing havoc with your age old beliefs about girls being a source of unbridled nuisance, you suddenly find yourself uncomfortably placed in a 'semi-kid' kind of a state, a lawless territory where its residents are labeled by the degree of confusedness on their sparsely moustached faces.
Contrarily, this does a world of wonders to the female population, especially for someone on M34I26S34’s growth path. Thanks to the hormonal thing (which works totally in their favor) that I briefly touched upon in the paragraph above, they are suddenly inundated with buying-your-bus- ticket and helping- you-with-your-homework offers.
Hence considering the fact that I carried fairly normal tendencies and was as hormonized as anyone else, it shouldn’t go against me if I told you that I happened to be one of the guys in the class who steered their attention towards the door, when they stepped into our classroom… the exchange students... from a formerly alien part of the world called Canada.
Pink looks hot on girls. This is probably the other thing to learn by the time you hit standard seven. I learnt this when I saw her wearing the color, partially eclipsed by our class teacher and the other girl she was accompanied with.
Standing amidst her escorts, she looked visibly shy and mildly perturbed by the hustle she had generated. Perhaps, she had planned to coolly walk into the class and hope no one would give two hoots about it. So much for wishful thinking, ha!
This is India, young ladies. You come from anyplace minutely foreign and you WILL be stared at!
“Hello children! Please join me in welcoming S14X17C and E12X17C! They have come from Canada and will be studying with us. I hope you will make them feel at home!” the teacher announced to our largely awestricken class.
Her wish seemed to have been heard rather instantly, as some of us dived into the task of wiping the dust and our partners off their seats, making place for the Canadian goddesses. While others, including me, restricted by the lack of courage than anything else, only managed to construct inviting expressions which bordered on the risk of appearing lecherous if overdone and pray earnestly that they might sit in the adjacent row or perhaps the row adjacent to the next two rows.
Feel at home? Hell yeah!
PS: Thanks to my teacher's rather vague form of introduction, it didn't strike me at first which one of X17C sisters was the girl in pink. I, of course, did manage to figure that out eventually.
4/8/09
Present Ma'am!
Back in school, the second strongest reason - the first being the natural lack of focus and motivation - to help me find solace as an underperforming flag-bearer of the underperformers, was a distinct team of faculty members.
Akin to a baton-wielding jail superintendent, working zealously towards making life as difficult and regretful for its resident inmates, these ‘givers of education’ strived to achieve a similar result.
To mention a few… there was that slap-happy Hindi professor, who had the tendency to whack the living daylights of anyone caught half-yawning during his awe-inspiring, post-lunch lectures. One neatly landed blow from this guy and you had the germs residing in your dental cavities dive into coma. Man, this guy could make a full-fledged Sunny paaji’s water-pump uprooting ‘Dhai kilo ka Haath’ assault feel like a peacock feather caressing your butt cheeks in comparison. Believe me, I speak from experience.
Then, we had Miss P58T67S - our PT instructor. This lady could make Hitler laugh his moustache off with her grammar-no-bare usage of the English language. I distinctly remember her telling us once, rather fondly, that she had ‘two daughters and both were girls’. I tell you, nothing was more daunting than conversing with her and yet maintaining a straight face. (Now you know whom to blame if you find something funny with my writing… Undesirably funny that is.)
Last, but not even remotely the least, was the Biology professor, who perhaps out of sheer affection for her subject, always found striking similarities between the animal kingdom and her class. Thus, on a given day, you could hear her calling someone a ‘dim-witted buffoon’, an ‘undernourished flea parasite’, a ‘super-sized amoeba’ or when highly agitated, a ‘bottom-of-the-food-chain dwelling, filter-feeding zooplankton’.
However, amidst and in spite of these wonderful reasons to get up every morning and head to school, there were few people who helped me sustain my belief in the Indian educational system.
The first being our librarian Miss L33I66B, who also doubled up as an invigilator during our exams – a favor which I will never forget. Apart from being a very kind and a gentle lady by nature, she was a deeply religious person as well. This, probably, prompted her to do nothing but softly announce “God is watching!” when she managed to find someone cheating in class. Undoubtedly, I owe her a lot to help me wade through most of my math papers.
And then of course was Miss S22H25L … my English and class teacher for standard six. She was easily the only person who deserved the title of ‘Miss’ as the rest were either married or even appeared to have married off their grand-children.
Ah, Miss S22H25L… She was way not married and was way not like the rest of them! She was, as I fondly recollect, my inspiration to take a bath before I left for school. She was, amidst the jaw-rattling, language-murdering and animal-comparing teachers, my inspiration to learn. She was the reason why I waited impatiently, one roll number at a time and all forty of them, to watch her look into the attendance registry and call out my number with that pleasing smile on her face.
“Present Ma’am!” I would scream, raising my hand with sheer delight.
Much to the horror of my fellow classmates, I began participating in debates, elocution competitions, roll playing activities, debates, quizzes and absolutely anything that had to with English and Miss S22H25L. I began answering ad-hoc questions; some which had even left the chronic toppers staring at the blackboard with gaping stupor.
(Now is perhaps a good time to reiterate to the post where I had spoken a bit about my roll number and my English marks. You probably must have realized by now why these two could have been the possible exemptions. Okay, back to this post.)
Yes, things were changing and they were changing fast. My perplexed twelve year old heart was finding it increasingly difficult to come in terms with this new and totally uncharted feeling. A feeling which by any sixth grader standards was as good as unlimited access to video games and toffee bars minus the need go to school or eat veggies for like a month.
But, as it happens with all earnest, one-sided love stories, the girl is fled away by a moustache-sporting, car-driving, MBA-holding, bank-managing guy… While the secret admirer (read me), the one who has tones of silent adoration for her in his bespectacled eyes (Okay, I had a number. Who doesn’t?) is left with well, just all by his self.
I learnt about Miss S22H25L’s engagement when she gleefully broke the news to the class and even resorted to distributing éclairs like it was an occasion worth celebrating. Citing an incessant pain in my tooth, I plainly declined from picking the sweet when she turned at my desk. For a moment or two, I felt she might have smelled the rat. Perhaps she must have noticed me munching a toffee bar right out of my tiffin box during the recess break. Nonetheless, she never made any fuss about it and walked on. And, so did I…
Slowly but steadily, I began to trudge back into my original self. The painful process of self-recuperation had begun. Questions were answered, but only when asked to. Hand was raised, but only to seek permission to attend a nature’s call. Bath was taken, but only when mum threatened.
By the time I entered standard seven, Miss S22H25L was honeymooning in Shimla. We had a new English teacher at our disposal. But, post Miss S22H25L, things never remained the same with English teachers. Thanks to my first and what could have been my last female-liking experience, I was months away turning into a hard-wired, tin-hearted, lifeless robot. Things would have pretty much headed in that direction, if life hadn’t met an abrupt diversion.
The year was 1996 and mathematics had just become stratospherically tougher. But it wasn’t something that had exactly caught my attention. It was something or rather someone else.
Akin to a baton-wielding jail superintendent, working zealously towards making life as difficult and regretful for its resident inmates, these ‘givers of education’ strived to achieve a similar result.
To mention a few… there was that slap-happy Hindi professor, who had the tendency to whack the living daylights of anyone caught half-yawning during his awe-inspiring, post-lunch lectures. One neatly landed blow from this guy and you had the germs residing in your dental cavities dive into coma. Man, this guy could make a full-fledged Sunny paaji’s water-pump uprooting ‘Dhai kilo ka Haath’ assault feel like a peacock feather caressing your butt cheeks in comparison. Believe me, I speak from experience.
Then, we had Miss P58T67S - our PT instructor. This lady could make Hitler laugh his moustache off with her grammar-no-bare usage of the English language. I distinctly remember her telling us once, rather fondly, that she had ‘two daughters and both were girls’. I tell you, nothing was more daunting than conversing with her and yet maintaining a straight face. (Now you know whom to blame if you find something funny with my writing… Undesirably funny that is.)
Last, but not even remotely the least, was the Biology professor, who perhaps out of sheer affection for her subject, always found striking similarities between the animal kingdom and her class. Thus, on a given day, you could hear her calling someone a ‘dim-witted buffoon’, an ‘undernourished flea parasite’, a ‘super-sized amoeba’ or when highly agitated, a ‘bottom-of-the-food-chain dwelling, filter-feeding zooplankton’.
However, amidst and in spite of these wonderful reasons to get up every morning and head to school, there were few people who helped me sustain my belief in the Indian educational system.
The first being our librarian Miss L33I66B, who also doubled up as an invigilator during our exams – a favor which I will never forget. Apart from being a very kind and a gentle lady by nature, she was a deeply religious person as well. This, probably, prompted her to do nothing but softly announce “God is watching!” when she managed to find someone cheating in class. Undoubtedly, I owe her a lot to help me wade through most of my math papers.
And then of course was Miss S22H25L … my English and class teacher for standard six. She was easily the only person who deserved the title of ‘Miss’ as the rest were either married or even appeared to have married off their grand-children.
Ah, Miss S22H25L… She was way not married and was way not like the rest of them! She was, as I fondly recollect, my inspiration to take a bath before I left for school. She was, amidst the jaw-rattling, language-murdering and animal-comparing teachers, my inspiration to learn. She was the reason why I waited impatiently, one roll number at a time and all forty of them, to watch her look into the attendance registry and call out my number with that pleasing smile on her face.
“Present Ma’am!” I would scream, raising my hand with sheer delight.
Much to the horror of my fellow classmates, I began participating in debates, elocution competitions, roll playing activities, debates, quizzes and absolutely anything that had to with English and Miss S22H25L. I began answering ad-hoc questions; some which had even left the chronic toppers staring at the blackboard with gaping stupor.
(Now is perhaps a good time to reiterate to the post where I had spoken a bit about my roll number and my English marks. You probably must have realized by now why these two could have been the possible exemptions. Okay, back to this post.)
Yes, things were changing and they were changing fast. My perplexed twelve year old heart was finding it increasingly difficult to come in terms with this new and totally uncharted feeling. A feeling which by any sixth grader standards was as good as unlimited access to video games and toffee bars minus the need go to school or eat veggies for like a month.
But, as it happens with all earnest, one-sided love stories, the girl is fled away by a moustache-sporting, car-driving, MBA-holding, bank-managing guy… While the secret admirer (read me), the one who has tones of silent adoration for her in his bespectacled eyes (Okay, I had a number. Who doesn’t?) is left with well, just all by his self.
I learnt about Miss S22H25L’s engagement when she gleefully broke the news to the class and even resorted to distributing éclairs like it was an occasion worth celebrating. Citing an incessant pain in my tooth, I plainly declined from picking the sweet when she turned at my desk. For a moment or two, I felt she might have smelled the rat. Perhaps she must have noticed me munching a toffee bar right out of my tiffin box during the recess break. Nonetheless, she never made any fuss about it and walked on. And, so did I…
Slowly but steadily, I began to trudge back into my original self. The painful process of self-recuperation had begun. Questions were answered, but only when asked to. Hand was raised, but only to seek permission to attend a nature’s call. Bath was taken, but only when mum threatened.
By the time I entered standard seven, Miss S22H25L was honeymooning in Shimla. We had a new English teacher at our disposal. But, post Miss S22H25L, things never remained the same with English teachers. Thanks to my first and what could have been my last female-liking experience, I was months away turning into a hard-wired, tin-hearted, lifeless robot. Things would have pretty much headed in that direction, if life hadn’t met an abrupt diversion.
The year was 1996 and mathematics had just become stratospherically tougher. But it wasn’t something that had exactly caught my attention. It was something or rather someone else.
4/4/09
50 percent of 50
I wasn’t, as you must have gathered from my last post, the most popular guy in school. Definitely not as popular as T78O89P (the chronic topper), M34I26S34 (the girl who had grown quickly & how!) or C2H3O8 (the science wiz kid… Man, that guy could devise a fully-functional bomb from the contents of a make-up kit, seriously)… And evidently, not as someone whose name a girl might remember when tapped in a local bus after a decade or so.
To put things in the right perspective, let’s say I was comfortably average. Like someone who found bliss in passing his subjects rather than scoring in them. Someone who was friends with most in his class but no one in particular belonged to his ‘circle’… maybe because he never had a circle… not even a triangle … not even a segment. Someone, whom most found was a nice guy to know but perhaps not nice enough to know for good…
Ha! Got you, didn’t I? Jyada senti hogaya kya? Aare boss, aisa kuch hota to kya mein yahan full-on Valmiki style mein apna school-puran likh raha hota?!!
To be true to you, the first line fits my scholastic personality bill like how those hot pants fitted Rimi Sen in the opening song of Dhoom 1 (Yeah, you know what I am talking about… ;) … or perhaps the first two lines, the second being only partially true.
You see the need to score 35 percent or the golden minimum was limited to 5 or perhaps 6 of the 9 subjects I had in a year. The number would have been far lesser if something as lovable as ‘Science’ had not mutated into an ugly three-headed monster namely, Biology, Chemistry and Physics by the time Phoolan Devi became an MP or I reached the seventh standard.
However, thanks to my extraordinarily developed mugging skills, I somehow saw the end of these subjects by the time I wrote my final exam. But, how do you deal with a subject that can’t be mugged? How do you deal with a subject that doesn’t award you five marks for filling a page or two with meaningless crap? How do you deal with something like… mathematics?
Yes, I hated Maths. I hated every percentage of it, it’s every permutation and combination, it’s every angle and it’s every side. I hated it as much as Rakhi Sawant hates to leave her house without make-up or with donning clothes more than ten inches in length. Okay, maybe not that much. Nonetheless, exam times with Maths were always difficult. The lack of scope for mugging always left me staring blankly into mine and then intently into the papers of those around me.
Of all frightful exam memories that still manage to wake me up in the middle of an office meeting, there is this one instance… one question that I might have stared so hard that it now appears to be photocopied in my mind. The question was something like:
Section 2. Solve the following (3 Marks each)
01. 50% of 50 is ___
Yeah… fifty percent of fifty. Two identical numbers separated by one confusing symbol and you’ve got the kid. Pure evil.
I am positive I hadn’t got it right back then. Now of course if you ask me, I can tell you right away the answer is … yes, it is… (Ah, now where is a frigging calculator when you need one?) … Ha! Yes, 25… I would have told you the answer is 25. But, I couldn’t back then. Going by the intellectual composition of my class, I can say for sure that 50% of the 50 odd students never got either. I was one of them. One of the 50%. And that’s how it remained for most of my initial schooling years. I was always trailed by 50% of the best. To make it sound better, I always managed to lead the 50% worst performing students… Comfortably average.
However, scoring consistently low wasn't all that bad afterall, as it soon turned out to be… The year was 1996 and we had a new student joining our class…
4/1/09
A Himeshious Encounter
The other day I spotted one of my long lost school acquaintances aboard a local bus (recession hain bhai) on my way home. She was seated a few rows ahead from where I stood, playing audience to a guy who was either insanely in love with or was under a legally binding contract to play Himesh numbers in public, as the speaker of his phone kept dishing out one melodic gem after another.
Now, I am not that kind of a guy who would barge into the ladies section of a BEST bus and strike a conversation with a girl I hadn’t seen for like a decade. But, considering the dangers associated with prolonged exposure to H-rays, I did just that. Well, almost that.
For the good part of the story, I did manage to leave the musical carnage a few seats behind. Snaking past a few bystanders who seemed to have either been zombiefied or were ardent fans of 'something, something more, something more... statue!' game, I reached the ‘ladies reserved’ section of the bus and stood right behind her seat. From the top view, I could see that she was engrossed in some heavy duty texting whilst listening to what I hoped was not Himesh on her iPod. Thus, after spending a minute or two trying to recollect her name, I finally called it out.
“Hi X29C56D…” (You probably must have noticed it by yourself, but I have change the name to protect her identity)
X29C65D gave no reaction. Not a turn of head or a swing of the bag or a fling of the sandal or any such act that might suggest that she heard me call her name. However, it was not that I hadn’t attracted any response at all. Everyone else seated in the perimeter of 4 chairs or so, stared at me like a young kid would stare at a captive monkey before his acrobatic performance – anticipating some form of entertainment. A large part of my audience which unfortunately consisted of rather hefty looking aunties had already labeled me as a regular ruffian, some staring hard enough to indicate they were trying to find resemblances with their neighborhood goon.
Must be the iPod, I reasoned.
Allowing me to believe that the music player had shunned her from all forms of worldly sounds apart from the ones it was playing, I decided to adopt a somewhat ‘physical’ form of gesticulation. Thus, breathing courage into my perplexed self, I tapped her shoulder using the icebergish tip of my index finger.
The trick worked. X29C56D looked up, looking as freaked out as any girl might be when tapped out of nowhere in a public mode of transport. The aunties looked up too. They had perhaps made their mind to pound me into a pulp if she made any signs of protest or annoyance. Much to their disappointment, she recognized me in an instant.
“Hey you… you were that guy from school, right?” She asked with a smile.
Okay, almost recognized me. But, good enough to save me from featuring as the ‘Breaking News: Bespectacled pervert gets lynched in a public bus!!!’ guy in the evening show of a local news channel.
“Yeah true, from school,” I replied, nodding my head. “I had a name too, it’s Vishal.”
“Oh yes! Vishal… Vishal V, follower of girls!” She announced with a chuckle.
Now, before you take cues from this story and assume that am a habitual female stalker, let me tell you that the term ‘follower of girls’ is spoken in a completely different context. The thing is, thanks to my initials, which is V followed by another… yes, you’ve guessed it, another V; I usually ended up getting the last of the ‘boy roll numbers’… thus making way for the girls in the class, starting with one of had AA as her initials. The only possible way to break the jinx was to get a minus vowel naming Chinese or a Polish exchange student in my class, but sadly, that never happened. (Speaking of exchange students… Well, more on that later)
“Yeah, the one who had the last of boy roll number and was preceded by the girls in the class,” I replied, detailing the point for the benefit of my blood-thirsty audience. “By the way, how are you doing?”
The conversation went on for the next 4 stops, after which, she had to alight the bus. Between those 4 stops, we spoke at length about each other, about our common friends and some events which involved me in a not so lets-disclose-on-a-public-blog way, while Himesh crooned in the background, declaring some soniye that he loved her unconditionally (Actual lyrics. In English. I swear) for the second consecutive time.
No sooner than later, my stop had arrived and I stepped down of the bus, taking some bits of Himesh and the conversation along with me. As I straddled my way home, my mind began to incline towards that summer of 1996 when the first and possibly the only batch of exchange students stepped into my classroom…
Well, more 0n that later… :)
Now, I am not that kind of a guy who would barge into the ladies section of a BEST bus and strike a conversation with a girl I hadn’t seen for like a decade. But, considering the dangers associated with prolonged exposure to H-rays, I did just that. Well, almost that.
For the good part of the story, I did manage to leave the musical carnage a few seats behind. Snaking past a few bystanders who seemed to have either been zombiefied or were ardent fans of 'something, something more, something more... statue!' game, I reached the ‘ladies reserved’ section of the bus and stood right behind her seat. From the top view, I could see that she was engrossed in some heavy duty texting whilst listening to what I hoped was not Himesh on her iPod. Thus, after spending a minute or two trying to recollect her name, I finally called it out.
“Hi X29C56D…” (You probably must have noticed it by yourself, but I have change the name to protect her identity)
X29C65D gave no reaction. Not a turn of head or a swing of the bag or a fling of the sandal or any such act that might suggest that she heard me call her name. However, it was not that I hadn’t attracted any response at all. Everyone else seated in the perimeter of 4 chairs or so, stared at me like a young kid would stare at a captive monkey before his acrobatic performance – anticipating some form of entertainment. A large part of my audience which unfortunately consisted of rather hefty looking aunties had already labeled me as a regular ruffian, some staring hard enough to indicate they were trying to find resemblances with their neighborhood goon.
Must be the iPod, I reasoned.
Allowing me to believe that the music player had shunned her from all forms of worldly sounds apart from the ones it was playing, I decided to adopt a somewhat ‘physical’ form of gesticulation. Thus, breathing courage into my perplexed self, I tapped her shoulder using the icebergish tip of my index finger.
The trick worked. X29C56D looked up, looking as freaked out as any girl might be when tapped out of nowhere in a public mode of transport. The aunties looked up too. They had perhaps made their mind to pound me into a pulp if she made any signs of protest or annoyance. Much to their disappointment, she recognized me in an instant.
“Hey you… you were that guy from school, right?” She asked with a smile.
Okay, almost recognized me. But, good enough to save me from featuring as the ‘Breaking News: Bespectacled pervert gets lynched in a public bus!!!’ guy in the evening show of a local news channel.
“Yeah true, from school,” I replied, nodding my head. “I had a name too, it’s Vishal.”
“Oh yes! Vishal… Vishal V, follower of girls!” She announced with a chuckle.
Now, before you take cues from this story and assume that am a habitual female stalker, let me tell you that the term ‘follower of girls’ is spoken in a completely different context. The thing is, thanks to my initials, which is V followed by another… yes, you’ve guessed it, another V; I usually ended up getting the last of the ‘boy roll numbers’… thus making way for the girls in the class, starting with one of had AA as her initials. The only possible way to break the jinx was to get a minus vowel naming Chinese or a Polish exchange student in my class, but sadly, that never happened. (Speaking of exchange students… Well, more on that later)
“Yeah, the one who had the last of boy roll number and was preceded by the girls in the class,” I replied, detailing the point for the benefit of my blood-thirsty audience. “By the way, how are you doing?”
The conversation went on for the next 4 stops, after which, she had to alight the bus. Between those 4 stops, we spoke at length about each other, about our common friends and some events which involved me in a not so lets-disclose-on-a-public-blog way, while Himesh crooned in the background, declaring some soniye that he loved her unconditionally (Actual lyrics. In English. I swear) for the second consecutive time.
No sooner than later, my stop had arrived and I stepped down of the bus, taking some bits of Himesh and the conversation along with me. As I straddled my way home, my mind began to incline towards that summer of 1996 when the first and possibly the only batch of exchange students stepped into my classroom…
Well, more 0n that later… :)
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