Friday, December 28, 2007

Merry Christmas

I had the loveliest time this Christmas season. It all started off on Wednesday the 20th. I had a three day weekend and my uncle offered to buy me a flight ticket so I could spend the weekend in Hyderabad. Wonderful uncle, no? To make things even better, by Thursday night I finished off the paper I was working on, so I didn’t need to work on the weekend either.

My flight to Hyderabad, which was supposed to take off at 10.30pm finally took off only at 1.30 am! I had been checking the flight timings on the net and the phone so I went to the airport only past midnight, but there were some poor souls who had been sitting in the airport and waiting for their flight from 9.30pm. This is my second flight on JetLite and I must say I’m very disappointed. Both this flight and the earlier one I took, from Delhi to Bangalore, were delayed by over 3 hours. I am willing to forgive this delay - given the fog and the holiday season traffic, all flight are getting delayed – but what really pisses me off is that even for such long delays they don’t bother to call and inform their passengers! Extremely inconsiderate and annoying.

*Ends rant*

So I reached Hyderabad only at 2.30 am Thursday night/ Friday morning and my poor uncle had to wake up in the middle of the night to come and pick me up. But the weekend went off beautifully. I met up with Gundu over coffee at CCD, went shopping with Swetha, watched Taare Zameen Par with Gundu, Swetha and Shruti, and ate pastries at Vacs. I also managed to fit in a visit to Tangering, my favouritest salon in the world. I also spent time at home with the family, and slept a lot and watched a lot of television.

Oh, and the food! The food. Sigh. I hogged on dosas every morning. I had egg cooked the way I like it. I had ‘chamadumpalu’ fry. I had pulao and home made spicy chicken curry. And my aunts’ famous custard. Such joy, I tell you!

So that was a lovely (and inexpensive) weekend. On Monday, JapBoy and I went to M’s place for a Christmas party (I love using these nicks). M has this little terrace in which she put out mats and mattresses, with a coal fire in between to keep us all warm. They had done up the place with fairy lights and a pretty little Christmas tree too. There was wine, good food and interesting people. I had the loveliest time, and was loath to go home – in fact, JapBoy had to drag me out of there.

I had invited friends over for a Christmas lunch, but I woke up late, and then we changed the venue to Nike’s place for various reasons. So I bought the supplies and rushed over there, where Savvy was waiting. She looked quite dubious when she saw that it was all raw materials I had in hand, but she soon rolled up her sleeves and took charge of the Paneer Tikki. Nike cooked the chicken and I cooked the pulao. BJ cut the onions and cried. Muggu helped all of us. And we had a lovely Christmas lunch – though Savvy had to rush and couldn’t taste the fruits of our efforts.

In the evening we went over the Brigade Road, which was all lit up and traffic less. People were walking up and down Brigade Road wearing the Santa caps, and there was a very festive atmosphere in the air. I gawked at the lights and soaked in the atmosphere. I also though of gifting myself shoes I had been longing after for a, uhm, well, long while – but I was on a tight budget and the shopkeeper was not very co-operative so I walked away empty handed. ( I still long for those shoes desperately…New Years is coming up though).

And then we ate ice cream and picked up food and went home and played cards late into the night.

So that was my Christmas - close friends, good food and lots of fun

Monday, December 03, 2007

In the devil's workshop today

I noticed this at a parking lot at my friends’ place - a car which says ‘FKCCI President’ and has an AP registration. Now FKCCI stands for Federation of Karnataka Chambers of Commerce and Industry. The current president is a Mr. S.S. Patil (not a Telugu name), who is the Chairman of a group of industries based out of Gulbarga. So it beats me as to why his car has an AP registration, given that it is a fairly new car, and it is unlikely that he has only recently moved to Karnataka.

Any ideas?