8th Dec 2010
Time of departure : (Official) -> 1:30 PM
As conveyed to Anish -> 2:00 PM
As taken by everyone -> 2:30 PM
Actual Time of Departure from Insti : 3:00 PM
Usually, this time frame is pretty acceptable for a contingent of >120 members, however, owing to IITD's exclusive single court Baddy team alone consisting of a mere 9 people was supposed to leave earlier and this was surely not ACCEPTABLE and TOLERABLE for so few members. Anyway, we did manage to get off on time('on time' based purely on the fact that we didnt miss the train) When I reach SAC, the chairman, Edwin Sir, Vijit and Adhu were already breathless with anxiety about where we all were. The bus had already reached and everyone was like ... Where are you guys?!! You were supposed to be here at 1:30. The others turned up fairly quickly except for Anish. When asked at 2:00 PM, he'd already left for SAC from H4. By 2:20, he was still nowhere in sight from SAC. Then a guy appeared pulling behind him a red bag as slowly as possible. It could only be him. Appaji sir, by now quite furious, commented "He's the captian, he has to show his importance". And the chairman motioned him to come faster. Anish's reply to that gesture ? You guessed it right, simply puts his head down ... and continues to walk at his own sweet pace (if you can call that pace at all )... So, we were finally loaded into the bus around 2:40 at SAC and we left for H10 to pick up the girls, who took their own sweet time to come down. (Sukhada ->" Oh tum log aa rahe ho kya? " As if there ws a choice! ) And with that for the first time in the last 3 years, the whole baddy team was off for Inter IIT Sports Meet together! Quite an achievment really, considering that Anish, Aashish and Sukhada were all uncertain with their placements, and once placed, Anish and Sukhada kept threatening to go home. Sukhada even managed to return in 1 day. Aashish hinted it once, but was shot down so badly that he didnt bother to bring it up again. The bus ride was fairly uneventful. Chuun it seems had put videos in his cell for the first time and was busy watching Munni and Shiela all the way to the station. I hadn't had the time to have lunch, so was quite relieved to find a McD there. And we stuffed ourselves up. Its never a good idea to order fries from McD in a group of >5 people. When asked, they always say, nai mujhe nai chahiye... and jab khud order karo... to sabko khana hota hai ... Afte McD, started the OCD for chaaai .... I will probably never understand what is in that 1 cup of tea... that makes lazy people like Anish and Aashish go right out of the station in search for it... and ... AND pay 10 Rs for it!!! Purely mysterious ... Edwin sir was getting harried with all this nonsensical whims pehle khana... then chaai .. and must have asked us to call these fellows back about a hundred times before they actually came back. Then we lugged our luggage all the way to our coach, B1. Its almost a pain when you book the tickets so early, you get the seats right in the first coach of the train... and then you have to walk and walk and walk till you get there. Everyone was pretty excited to go on Rajdhani. Once in the train, Anish and Aashish once again UNCHARACTERISTICALLY went in search of cards and poker coins ! How?!Meanwhile, Mittal called. He had been getting restless right since the camp had started and we were almost giving him hourly updates about our position. We made plans to meet up the next day. We didnt want to go all the way to his place... he didnt want to come all the way to IITD.... so in the end, it was still undecided... but eventually, we all knew... it would always be like he wants it to be .... jana to hame hi padega...
Train mein.... I had hoped to make a lot of noise... and piss off a lot of people ... just like the Yellow Chilli's treat .... but .... sadly... everyone was acting tooo sober .... and we hardly made any noise. In fact, the people in the next compartment made more noise than us... and it was so SHAMEFUL....
Chuunn stated the traintertainment with Mahabharat ... During camp time, we'd been paining Anvita to tell a story and Chuun suddenly got infi enthu to tell a story ... and from somewhere landed up on Mahabharat ! Sharada got on the bandwagon bcz she has a thing for discussing indian mythology and it was decided... chuunn would tell Mahabharat on the train... It was so LAME! We all expected Chuun to narrate the story in his "funny" and "graphical" way ... and he started in ENGLISH ... "straight from his heart" ... "A long long time ago, there lived a King Shantanu ..... " Needless to say, it was boring ... so we asked him to do it in hindi with his usual "hugga" ... To his credit, he did make it interesting for a while ... but soon enough Sharada was the only one who was interested to listen to him ... and Anish had had enough by then... We were served evening snacks meanwhile... which was pretty nice ...
Then we ended up trying to play a round of DumbC in which Aashish went crazy ... he guessed "Qutub Minar ki saatwi manzil par" with only the words "Qutub Minar" and "saat" and claimed that he didnt even know the movie... HAHA we are not believing that ... Aditya cracked "Rec".. he broke it into 2 parts "re" and "c" ... and for "c" he acted for "sea".... and thereafter went in "repeat mode" to show "re" ... kept lifting the bottle and placing it...Chuun ka giveup ho gaya tha dekh ke.. "kya baar baar wohi kar raha hai..." Kaafi der baad.... they reached Rec... Afte DumbC, we decided to play Judgement.. and the usual debate ensued ... kya point system rakhna hai .... (I hope we can fix the point system for Judgement this time ... Unless there's a 3/4th majority, the current judgement point system shall remain for all future Inter IITs) And the game got underway .... once again with the stupid point system (in which there was no negative marking! ) everyone was clustered around 60 points and only Aashish was the outright loser with 41 points ... Dinner was a subdued affair ... and it wasn't really good ... we had an animated discussion about drumsticks and bread sticks and whether they should be hard or soft ... but the soup was horrible (according to others, I didnt agree) ... After dinner, we were all doing our stuff, Anish busy on phone... Chuunn watching his videos ... me Sharada Anvita engrossed in word games ... once anish was done with his phone, he disrupted all the activities going on... and Chuunn gave this puzzle ... 12 balls with one defective to find in 3 weighings ... As of 12/12/10 we still dont have a complete solution to it .... but I have no hesitation in proudly stating that we have not yet given up and looked for solutions elsewhere ... :P ... The puzzle took up most of the time till 12... when we decided to turn in.... and the usual scramble for berths ensued. Anish, Sharada and I wanted middle berths, Aditya and Kunal wanted lowe berths and Aashish wanted the top berth. Anvita and Tejas being juniors had no say at all ... and after much adieu we got our berths ready to sleep... then, as I couldnt get any sleep, we (Anish and I ) started watching FRIENDS .... thodi der friends dekhne ke baad... as usual... bhook lagna shuru ... then we got moong daal and pure magic and sat munching away... aashish on the upper berth got the whiff of it.. and soon a hand came down "abe de naaa.... kaise kamine ho be!! " ... thodi der mein Ratlaaam aaya ... and we got down... while we were getting down, this AC wala staff says, kisi ko bhi ghusne mat dena... and then, as we were getting down, a completely bedraggled guy starts to get on the train ... Aashish is like .. kahaan jana hai bhaiya.. nai chadhne denge.. and shoo'ed him away .. (apparently he didnt even know where he wanted to go... :P) fir chaaai dhundne ki fight.. (which probably was unsuccessful as far as i remember) ... wapas berth pe aake sooo gaye........
Muzzooorieeee day 3- the last day :(
And before we knew it, the last day of the trip dawned... We all were being very lazy. We had to check out by 10 and somehow anish and i managed to wake each other up by 915. We realized we also had to transfer photos and then it was all memory cards and cameras and hard disks. Somehow we got everything packed by 10. Sharada then gave a piece of her mind to the room service guy as there was no hot water and we had to check out by 10. They got ready around 1030 and we clicked some final pics in the hotel. We went down to udupi for breakfast when aashish called. He'd reached delhi and was getting bored at rajeev chowk. Once again aditya's order came last (Pichle baar bhi jab gaye the tab bhi bichare ka last aaya tha and that too he'd ordered masala dosa... Baakiyon ke exotic orders pehle aa gaye the) breakfast ke baad we entered into one of our usual gross discussions about food only this time it was not initiated by chuunn but by anish. He started pouring sambar into chutni, chutni in sambar, crumpled tissue paper in sambar saying that he is doing all this so that they do not reuse it. And the expected argument followed " what if they do reuse it DESPITE all the crap we did" ... Breakfast ke baad everything seemed to be in slow motion...there ws no real hurry for anything as we had nothing planned the whole day. We decided to go to the company gardens and due to the infinite availability of time, decided to WALK... Yeah thats right!! Walk all the way to the gardens, we figured since the rick wale were asking 30 bucks for it, it wouldnt be really very far from the main mussoorie square. And we started walking... On the way stopping at infi shops.. Looking here and there, anish got his tea. We clicked some more pics... Looked around in more woolen shops and dheere dheere kept plodding along. Our only agenda for the day was the sit in the dhoop in the garden and complete accounts. It was almost as if everyone was scared of getting bored so nobody pained anyone for taking any amount of time in any stupid shop... Slowly we reached the imperial(library) square where we'd gotten off the first day... Then the taxi stand from where we had taken taxis the day before... It was a pleasant walk... The funny thing was, the farther we went, the farther the gardens got from us!! When we started somebody told us it was 2 kms away, by the time we reached the taxi stand, people were telling us that it was 5 km away!! However, with nothing else to do but reach the gardens, we continued on... On the way, stopped at another tapri for chaai and clicked some more pics...( cant remember what exactly we were talking about on the way to the gardens, but i remember it was funny enough, probably it was about sharada's obsessively compulsive clean habits and hand sanitizers ... And how she probably lived in a "clean house" :-P) the sun kept playing hide and seek all the way ... Chuunn kept almost falling over at places "mussoorie teda hai" the snow capped peaks were visivle at some distance... We reached an internet cafe and chuun and anish wanted to take printouts of their tickets back.. The connection was so so slow that once logged in, chuun regretted logging in at all as it took infi time to log out...(god knows why he wouldnt just close the browser, who in mussoorie anyway was interested in chuun's gmail account!!) so on we went again..( repeating the phrase in hope of capturing how long it realllly seemed it took ) then we came across a puppy and anvita and sharada got all typical girly about it... "soooo cute" wala stuff :-P anvita even went ahead and asked the owner if she could take the dog along with her to the park... Guess we finally did reach the park after that... And i want to say it was soooo worth the walk! But... Just cant stretch the truth to those limits... It was a sad sad garden... There were no lush green lawns that i'd been hoping for... There were no beautiful exotic flowers, just a sad little fountain in the center. There was some sunshine when we reached which disappeared quickly enough and it became really chilly later. Sharada and i went on the giant wheel... ( bechare aditya ko bhi jana tha but faltu mein kataya in hope that they'll have me and sharada sitting together, but their plan was foiled as it was better for the balance to sit on opposite ends) giant wheel ke baad we started looking for a place to sit in the sun and carry out our accounts... We found the perfect place by the "pond" ( cant think of any other word for it) and lots of sunshine. Within minutes our placing the order, the sun went behind the hills and i became so cold, i could hardly write the expenses down properly) we decided to finish eating quickly and proceed inside the copper grill (glass housed restaurent)... We had probably the most intelluctual session of the trip then ( oops not really, chuun's puzzle is yet to be solved) we started figuring out expenses. Took a while for getting everything marked down first, then who owed how much to whom. Made a "from to" matrix and then reductions were carried out in the matrix to clear the balances in the minimum number of transactions. I realized cs minor had indeep taught me something and for the first time in my life, i could think in cycles in a directed graph and stuff... But enough of it, dont want to get too geeky here. Once done with the expenses, (which was a pretty exciting affair for everyone actually, at one point of time, aditya was goin to get 400 bucks and in the end ended up getting only 35 :-p, the unanimous conclusion reached was that aashish owed a lot of money to everyone) we started heading back. Tejas and sharada wanted to do some shopping so they refused to walk all the way back and took a ric. I simply felt too lazy to bargain with the rickshaw ppl and decided it was better to walk to be involved in tht stupidity. And everyone else too seemed quite in a "walking" mood. We had the most awesome discussion of the whole trip... It all started with chuun telling anvita that it was high time that she start talking, otherwise, for example when anish came 2 years later to insti, he wouldnt even remember her... And then somehow we started disussing marriages. Aditya provided his customary radical views on marriage which as always made sense but were just too shocking to really believe in. He said something like if a guy has to resort to arranged marriage, he is not capable of finding a suitable person (specifically not capable to convince a suitable person to marry him) and hence, even after marriage, as he is not going to gain the power overnight, he will remain faithful. On the other hand, a person in love marriage is capable enough to "pataaofy" someone and so even after marriage can get someone to marry him(/her, not to sound sexist :-p, atleast this is what i understood from the discussion, correct me if i'm wrong aditya) and then we reached live-in relationships , good or bad... Chuunn was all for it and the rest of us not so much. The Minutes of the whole discussion would require a whole new blog post( a task which anvita is going to perform admirably :-p, hai na?) but the funniest part of it was, chuun brings this up at his home pretty frequently, just to vex his parents and it always ends up with his mom getting angry and senti and chuunn not getting food to his liking at home for a week :-p, and so he has to drop the subject. Engrossed in the discussion, we just didnt realize how quickly the time passed and we already were at the tea shop. "chaai to peena banta hai yaar" no prizes for guessing who said it, and chaai peeke we continued on our way. We decided to walk till where tejas and sharada were and then head back to the hotel. Somehow we had managed to spend the whole day without getting bored at all ( at that moment it did seem like a big task, but today it feels stupid to even think that we would have gotten bored with each other) anish and chuun found a place to get printouts of their tickets. Chuunn was in a big dilemma whether to go by the sleeper train in the aftrnoon the next day which would take 30 hours to reach or take a chance and hope that his ac ticket would get confirmed. I had 2 tickets too and wanted to go by the evening train but it was waitlisted 1. Anvita anf i went to look for tejas and sharada. Having found them, it turned out that sharada had succeeded in buying nothing at all in all this time!!! So there was some last minute hurried shopping she finally had to do. The others had already headed back to the hotel and taken their things to the taxi stand. Anvita sharada and i were the only ones still left in the market area. It was 6:30 and high time for us to head back. And jaldi jaldi we reached our hotel back, took our luggage and left for the taxi stand too... The others had already hired two taxis and our luggage was loaded. ( luckily, in all the hurry, i forgot to feel sad tht it really was over now) we packed 2 alu parathas to eat on the way to dehra dun and we were off. On the way back i again got to hear anish's story, this time narrated for sharada's benefit. We pestered anvita and sharada to tell some stories from their schooltime but both didnt have anything interesting( was my school the only school where interesting things happened?!! ) by the time we reached down, anish and i had started feeling a little giddy. It was one winding trip down and i was also a bit worried that we might be getting late. We did manage to reach by 9 and our train was scheduled at 9:25... So peacefully mil gai. Once in the train, everyone first seemed enthu for a nightout, after all, it was our last night together in 2010. We played random cheezon ki antakshari like names of movies and names of places, all geeky geeky stuff... Aditya was awesome in movies ki antakshari. He would come up with random movie names and then say,"sunny deol and urmila matondkar ki movie hai" with full confidence as if the person who did not believe him was such an ignorant fool! I remember us having particular difficulty with movie names starting with n And y. (someone had come up with namaste london and it was crackk as it ended in n too ) but, dheere dheere, logon ka enthu kam ho gaya and once anish says sona hai, theres no point even arguing about it. Sleeper was a bit of a mistake in the season. It was damn cold and i just couldnt sleep. Infact even others had a bad night and when we reached delhi in the morning, everyone was infi tired.
Now i m definitely not going to write about the last day as it makes me very very sad to recount those moments of
Bidding everyone goodbye. Bas the imp thing was, anish's train did go to ajmer, i couldnt manage to get waitlist 1 cleared( kiske saath hota hai yaar aisa!!) chuun and aditya reached infi infi late and sharada anvita and i wr lucky enough to reach home only with a few hours delay.
And so ended The most memorable trip of my life till date ... Wishing everyone could go sometime again...
Now i m definitely not going to write about the last day as it makes me very very sad to recount those moments of
Bidding everyone goodbye. Bas the imp thing was, anish's train did go to ajmer, i couldnt manage to get waitlist 1 cleared( kiske saath hota hai yaar aisa!!) chuun and aditya reached infi infi late and sharada anvita and i wr lucky enough to reach home only with a few hours delay.
And so ended The most memorable trip of my life till date ... Wishing everyone could go sometime again...
Muzzooorieeee day 2
Day 2 Mussoorie:
We'd planned to get up at 7:30 and get ready fast and go around.... we got up at 8:40 ... once again, Anish started screaming ... "kya sote rehete ho yaar" and then we got ready quickly and went down to have breakfast... once again, not so good... we then got into ricks to go to the taxi stand. It was already around 9:30 when we got to the taxi stand. At the stand, we had a long long discussion about where we should go... and it was decided we would go to lake mist, yamuna bridge and kempty falls. We tried our best to bargain a little but were thoroughly unsuccessful :P ek paisa bhi kam nai kiya usne... plus.. when we asked him to give us ambassadors, he didnt even agree to that. finally, after a lot of pain, he agreed to give us one alto. The motion sickness-prone people (Sharada, Anish, Anvita and I) got into the alto and others got into the van. There was some confusion about where we would go first... Anish wanted to go to Lake Mist second, the driver said it could only be first or third ... and eventually, we were off to Yamuna Bridge. On the way, we stopped at a couple of places to click some pictures. In the car we sang songs ... but Anish got all sleepy and Sharada's throat was gone... so it was basically Anvita and me who were doing the singing. The ride to Yamuna bridge took about an hour and it was a pretty beautiful place. The usual photography session ensued ... first on the bridge.. .then we went down to the river. It was a very quiet and serene place. Sharada got unusually lost in her thoughts and chose the farthest possible rock to contemplate on her hygenic life :P I tried to take a different (less steeper) route to the river, but it ended in a herd of goats and a very steep path down. I was feeling kinda reckless that day... and decided to go along with it ... I did manage to get down successfully :) Anish found his own rock to sit on and look into the distance (basically, he was hoping someone would take his "natural" pic :P ) The others, were all lined up on a horizontal tree trunk and were clicking shadow pics. Then, there was a rock just adrift and I very much wanted to get on it... but the flow of the river was quite fast there and had I not been in the reckless mood I was in, I probably wouldnt have been the first to attempt going on it. I virtually had my heart in my mouth when I reached the rock because my feet had gone cold the flow was really scary and there was no place to hold and pull myself on the rock. Anish and Aashish were coolly laughing at my misery :-/ Once I was there, everyone wanted to come .. and one by one Aashish, Anish, Sharada and Anvita made their way to the rock too. We were sitting there for quite a while clicking away random pics. The taxi people finally called us back and we started going back ... In the whole going back process, Anvita dropped Aashish's camera in the river and luckily it didnt flow adrift... but it was fully drenched in water. Aditya asked something about "kitne ka THA wo" and Aashish was like .. "THA nai.. HAI !!!" (@AA: How is the camera btw?) On the way up, we clicked some more shadow pics on that tree trunk (as the ones in Aa's cam were probably destroyed :P) we were looking really stupid from the bridge as Kunal and others were telling ... wahaan se ... we got back into the cars and headed for Kempty Falls... The Kempty falls took about half an hour to reach and from there it was a 10 min walk down to the falls. Frankly, the falls were a bit of anti-climax. This was the prime sightseeing point of Mussoorie and it didnt even seem like a Fall. Plus, there were some people continuously removing sand and gravel from some sort of swimming pool below it. It was pretty cold there too. We had Maggi at the Falls and in the cold weather, it simply tasted awesome! Needless to say, chaai bhi piye the ... and we got a nice mini-campfire burning around which we all sat. We started heading back up after that and on the way, Anvita crackked "chanawala" Wihle coming down, Anvita had bought chana from a vendor and she wanted some yellow "dal" for which he was charging extra 5 Rs. On reaching the falls, she found that the vendors there were not chargig the extra 5 bucks. So, while going back up, she says "Kaise chor ho aap ... neeche waale to iske 5 rupaye extra nai maang rahe! " Anish Aashish and I burst out laughing! It was hilarious... bina soche samjhe kuch bhi bol deti hai.. and then she argued half the way up ki maine kuch galat thodi kiya... wo chori hi to kar raha tha ! Upar chadte chadhte everyone started feeling hungry ... Aditya was of the opinion that we should make this climb a regular part of our daily warm up and I was totally for it :D We were to go to Lake Mist next, and what a stupid thing it turned out to be! First of all, the place where we were taken had no lake in sight. Then we were told that upon entry, we would be taken to the lake and in any case it was an artificial lake so it couldnt be very big... we told him that let one of us go inside check out the lake and then decide whether all of us want to go in ... he flatly refused for that ... and we decided to hell with it! It seemed a very stupid place.. not a single person around except for us and the rates for entry were so HIGH! OMG!! We went back up and asked our taxi walas to take us to some other place instead (kinda reminded of of that Mall in Kanpur!) and he agreed to take us to a temple. The temple also had a long climb up but the views from the top were breath-taking! We also saw an owl and a woodpecker .. it was a very quiet and peaceful place.. by the time we left from there, everyone was deadd tired and hungry. We realized that we did not have any money to pay the taxi walas, so they had to take us to an atm first and then they dropped us off at the library square. It was around 5 then... already time for Aashish to leave :( and the sense of trip coming to an end loomed over everyone. Aashish's taxi was at 7 ... and we had our meal and headed back to the hotel. once in the hotel, we wasted no time in getting under the blankets... aashish had to pack and leave.. and he took away my camera for the much awaited "bonding session" :P (abhi tak wapas nai mila hai camera) .. we started watching movies.. pehle I Robot, then Transformers, then Pearl Harbour ... in between we were supposed to have dinner but were in no condition to get up. Chuun and Aditya went for non veg and we asked them to get some biscuits and amul kool for us. Thoda sa room service se order karwa liye and till 1-2 we were watching movies, then some friends.. and then finally good night. The valley looked very beautiful from our room at night. It was like a sea of yellow stars stretched across the valley .. at 3 AM, Sukhada msged saying that she had finally reached! What a torture it must have been for her! And with that, another awesome day came to an end ....
(why am i the one subject to THIS torture always? I get so sad while writing it :-/)
We'd planned to get up at 7:30 and get ready fast and go around.... we got up at 8:40 ... once again, Anish started screaming ... "kya sote rehete ho yaar" and then we got ready quickly and went down to have breakfast... once again, not so good... we then got into ricks to go to the taxi stand. It was already around 9:30 when we got to the taxi stand. At the stand, we had a long long discussion about where we should go... and it was decided we would go to lake mist, yamuna bridge and kempty falls. We tried our best to bargain a little but were thoroughly unsuccessful :P ek paisa bhi kam nai kiya usne... plus.. when we asked him to give us ambassadors, he didnt even agree to that. finally, after a lot of pain, he agreed to give us one alto. The motion sickness-prone people (Sharada, Anish, Anvita and I) got into the alto and others got into the van. There was some confusion about where we would go first... Anish wanted to go to Lake Mist second, the driver said it could only be first or third ... and eventually, we were off to Yamuna Bridge. On the way, we stopped at a couple of places to click some pictures. In the car we sang songs ... but Anish got all sleepy and Sharada's throat was gone... so it was basically Anvita and me who were doing the singing. The ride to Yamuna bridge took about an hour and it was a pretty beautiful place. The usual photography session ensued ... first on the bridge.. .then we went down to the river. It was a very quiet and serene place. Sharada got unusually lost in her thoughts and chose the farthest possible rock to contemplate on her hygenic life :P I tried to take a different (less steeper) route to the river, but it ended in a herd of goats and a very steep path down. I was feeling kinda reckless that day... and decided to go along with it ... I did manage to get down successfully :) Anish found his own rock to sit on and look into the distance (basically, he was hoping someone would take his "natural" pic :P ) The others, were all lined up on a horizontal tree trunk and were clicking shadow pics. Then, there was a rock just adrift and I very much wanted to get on it... but the flow of the river was quite fast there and had I not been in the reckless mood I was in, I probably wouldnt have been the first to attempt going on it. I virtually had my heart in my mouth when I reached the rock because my feet had gone cold the flow was really scary and there was no place to hold and pull myself on the rock. Anish and Aashish were coolly laughing at my misery :-/ Once I was there, everyone wanted to come .. and one by one Aashish, Anish, Sharada and Anvita made their way to the rock too. We were sitting there for quite a while clicking away random pics. The taxi people finally called us back and we started going back ... In the whole going back process, Anvita dropped Aashish's camera in the river and luckily it didnt flow adrift... but it was fully drenched in water. Aditya asked something about "kitne ka THA wo" and Aashish was like .. "THA nai.. HAI !!!" (@AA: How is the camera btw?) On the way up, we clicked some more shadow pics on that tree trunk (as the ones in Aa's cam were probably destroyed :P) we were looking really stupid from the bridge as Kunal and others were telling ... wahaan se ... we got back into the cars and headed for Kempty Falls... The Kempty falls took about half an hour to reach and from there it was a 10 min walk down to the falls. Frankly, the falls were a bit of anti-climax. This was the prime sightseeing point of Mussoorie and it didnt even seem like a Fall. Plus, there were some people continuously removing sand and gravel from some sort of swimming pool below it. It was pretty cold there too. We had Maggi at the Falls and in the cold weather, it simply tasted awesome! Needless to say, chaai bhi piye the ... and we got a nice mini-campfire burning around which we all sat. We started heading back up after that and on the way, Anvita crackked "chanawala" Wihle coming down, Anvita had bought chana from a vendor and she wanted some yellow "dal" for which he was charging extra 5 Rs. On reaching the falls, she found that the vendors there were not chargig the extra 5 bucks. So, while going back up, she says "Kaise chor ho aap ... neeche waale to iske 5 rupaye extra nai maang rahe! " Anish Aashish and I burst out laughing! It was hilarious... bina soche samjhe kuch bhi bol deti hai.. and then she argued half the way up ki maine kuch galat thodi kiya... wo chori hi to kar raha tha ! Upar chadte chadhte everyone started feeling hungry ... Aditya was of the opinion that we should make this climb a regular part of our daily warm up and I was totally for it :D We were to go to Lake Mist next, and what a stupid thing it turned out to be! First of all, the place where we were taken had no lake in sight. Then we were told that upon entry, we would be taken to the lake and in any case it was an artificial lake so it couldnt be very big... we told him that let one of us go inside check out the lake and then decide whether all of us want to go in ... he flatly refused for that ... and we decided to hell with it! It seemed a very stupid place.. not a single person around except for us and the rates for entry were so HIGH! OMG!! We went back up and asked our taxi walas to take us to some other place instead (kinda reminded of of that Mall in Kanpur!) and he agreed to take us to a temple. The temple also had a long climb up but the views from the top were breath-taking! We also saw an owl and a woodpecker .. it was a very quiet and peaceful place.. by the time we left from there, everyone was deadd tired and hungry. We realized that we did not have any money to pay the taxi walas, so they had to take us to an atm first and then they dropped us off at the library square. It was around 5 then... already time for Aashish to leave :( and the sense of trip coming to an end loomed over everyone. Aashish's taxi was at 7 ... and we had our meal and headed back to the hotel. once in the hotel, we wasted no time in getting under the blankets... aashish had to pack and leave.. and he took away my camera for the much awaited "bonding session" :P (abhi tak wapas nai mila hai camera) .. we started watching movies.. pehle I Robot, then Transformers, then Pearl Harbour ... in between we were supposed to have dinner but were in no condition to get up. Chuun and Aditya went for non veg and we asked them to get some biscuits and amul kool for us. Thoda sa room service se order karwa liye and till 1-2 we were watching movies, then some friends.. and then finally good night. The valley looked very beautiful from our room at night. It was like a sea of yellow stars stretched across the valley .. at 3 AM, Sukhada msged saying that she had finally reached! What a torture it must have been for her! And with that, another awesome day came to an end ....
(why am i the one subject to THIS torture always? I get so sad while writing it :-/)
Muzzooorrieee day 1
The first day at mussorie. We reached dehra dun in the morning at 615. Took infi time to get down from the train. We were probably the last people to get off. We were so lazy that we started the process of getting down only when the we heard the train whistle and got scared that it was going to the yard. Sharada was the first to get up and was so hyper that she was down from her berth more than half an hour before the train arrived. From the dehra dun station we took 2 taxis to mussoorie. It was early early morning. Even before sunrise. Infact during the taxi ride, we saw the sunrise. I felt a bit dizzy during the ride and around 730 we reached the top. We took rickshaws to the honeymoon inn hotel and luckily the rooms were already ready. And they were AWESOME!!! The girls got a proper honeymoon suite complete with a circular bed and curtains:-p it was really funny!! They also had a huge mirror facing the bed and we'd a mini photosession then and there. They seemed pretty pleased with the room too !! We ordered our breakfast and most of the things werent good at all, i guess apart from the pao bhaji (for which ironically anvita had been subject to a lot of ridicule already) nothing was good at all. The milk had a layer of oil on the top of it. Post breakfast anish and aashish left in quest for tea. I was so sleepy, i probably couldnt anyway have stayed up a minute longer. We decided to get up by 12 for sightseeing. I got up to anish's screams " do baj gaye be... Kya sote rehete ho." and bas sabko zorr zorr se uthane chala gaya. Fight maarke we all got ready to go by 230 and then began our search for finding an agreeable place for lunch. Sharada anish and i wanted to eat at nirulas, chuun aditya and tejas wanted to have some proper nonveg food. They ended up eating somewhr else. Nirula's at mussoorie was pretty nice, the ambience was really good and the food was not bad either. We had pizzas, chole bature and death by chocolate which after chuun's arrival hardLy anyone got to taste ... Oh yeah, on the way to nirulas we stopped at infi roadside shops for buying gloves and topis. Must have irritated atleast a dozen shopkeepers looking at their stuff and not buying anything at all... Aashish and i became glove partners too :-p we then went to the gunhill point. We had to take a trolley to the top of the hill. Anish had never been on a cable car before and so he was quite excited about it. But it was one boring ride up and it hardly took 5 minutes. On the top of gunhill it was quite breezy and chilly. We got engrossed in our usual random photography clicking away arbitly here and there. The funny thing was there was a sort of balcony like area where everyone was clicking pics and the doorway to it had "toilet" written on it :-p the views were pretty good from the place. There were infi tp games shops at the top. Chuun tried his hand at that balloon shooting game and he turned out to be quite good at it. Obviously, his gloating accompanied his success :-P we also tried our hand at archery which was quite fun...the girls bought some funny springlike bracelet thingy. We then had an unusually quiet time as we all sat cramped between 2 shops watching the sunset. With that we decided to proceed down to the mall road. Anish had been having a relatovely quiet bday till then and we wr all thinking how we could make it better, once down from the cable car, i decided to fake sickness ( which incidently is a very genuine excuse for me now :-/) and see if somethin could be done in the room. I told sharada to take as muh time as possible to return to the hotel while i got all the stuff required. In the end, i must say that i was quite pleased with what i could manage and the only dampner wad that i anish came to the room unexpectedly and hence i didnt have the time to light the candles and put on the happy bday song on my laptop. (He just had to choose that moment to pee didnt he!!) anyway, he was very touched with the surprise and went on like " pagal hai kya be!! Ye sab kaun karta hai... Gale mil yaar!!" we had a great time then with the snow spray and the ribbon spray and cake and balloon bursting. The only thing missing was putting cake on his face, but the baddy team is too mindful not to waste any cake. By the time we were done woth the celebratuons, the room was in such a mess that we were too ashamed even to ask the reception guy to clean it up. Thankfully, the hotel ppl were very helpful and sent someone to clean up the room immediately even at that late an hour. We went for dinner at udupi where the food wasnt so good... But everyone was probably on their best mood of the trip, so dinner was a very enjoyable experience. Chuun was thoroughly satisfied with his onion uttapam...idlis were ok, but sambaar and chutni were horrible. I started feeling very senti that night when i realized that anish and aashish wont be around the next year... After dinner, anish and aashish wanted to have tea and we went in search of that. Chuun tejas and aditya had "gatored" plans and were getting their stuff ready. We wandered off in search of tea... It was a beautiful night... Soo starry ... Plus it wasnt surprisingly very cold too. Anish and aashish pained me for a while and then anish narrated his love story to aashish (will i ever tire of hearing that one!!) later we headed back to the rooms ... Huun and others had already got underway and were strting to go in tht "funny" place ... We decided to play cards for sometime and after a lot of debating, started playing 250 a game much like 304 which mittal (wish i had an option to tag people in the blog, that way mittal wouldnt have had to read the whole entry to see where he was mentioned :-P) had taught... The girls had refused to play with us, anvita was probably feeling very uncomfortable and she went off to he room. Sharada wasnt feeling well and she was reading her book. The game finally got underway but 5 minutes into the game, we realized it was a futile activity tryin to play woh chuun in that state. Everytime the game reached a crucial juncture, he did something stupid and started laughing like an idiot. Chuun wad blabbering random stuff about MI "youngistan ka wow" how he was interviewed and what not...Anish aashish and mera kaafi giveup ho chuka tha and we decided to turn in for the night. Anish went off with his phone and so did aashish. Tired with such an eventful day and happy that i could make a very special friends bday memorable, i went to sleep in a very happy state :) for once not thinking about the inter iit loss...
Muzzooorieeee
Thus begins our mussorie trip... And not without much excitement... Infact 5 hours ago, we were at the brink of canceling the whole plan. The one thing that excited everyone for mussoorie was the mahindras resort, and when i went to print the confirmation today, to my great shock, i discovered that the booking had been made for november 22 and 23. Wow!! Could i really mess it up this much?! Sharada was with me when i made the discovery and to her credit, she was quite cool about it. I probably experienced a million emotions in that instant. Was i really this dumb?!! Why always me?!! And why on this tour everything that could go wrong continued to go wrong :-/ i dreaded telling aashish anish and others that the one thing we'd been looking forward to after our defeat might also not work out. Well, in the end, it has somehow been sorted out and we hv ended up with 3 super delux rooms in the honeymoon inn hotel. :-P the name has already been a talking point in the team. So it ws decided to leave the hostel at 930 pm for hauz khas metro and by ten we bid farewell to the iitd campus. I was surprised to find no one else really senti about leaving (except for anish, though for entirely different reasons :-p ) i, on the other hand felt quite sad to be leaving. Lots of things kept goin through my mind in those final moments of packing. Its really strange how one experiences such contrasting emotions while packing. When in bombay, i was thrilled!! Today, i couldnt bring myself to start packing right until the last moment... All those scenes of inter iit kept playing in my mond .... arriving in the morning and finding those stupid partioning walls in the rooms ... Moving the beds together in aditya and tejas's room only to never really use them... Going out for late night tea ... Sitting in the room with aashish chuun and anish and watching friends... Siting with sharada and sukhada trying to work out kgps doubles ... Even lying on the bed all day sick worrying whether i'd be okay for the quarters ... Making plans to move around delhi ... Going to these boring historic places only to click infi infi pictures ( god knows how many facebook display puc every has now to choose from, though i'd sure miss putting the annual pic with the trophy this time :-( ) ... Am i ever goin to experience all this again?! :-(
Anyway, digressed a bit there, (still obviously experiencing the post inter iit blues) so our ride from hauz khas to new delhi took about half an hour. I was sitting with anvita and she was on a roll. Some guy was playing music on his cell inside the metro and evidently its not allowed in delhi metros. And this gets anvita started " kaun dhakkan hai ye jo zorr zorr se gaane bajaa raha hai? " " Main zorr se isliye bol rahi hoon ki wo sune aur band kare" this even got the stranger guy next to us laughing :-) at ndls we walked walked and walked to get out of the metro station, then took some time in figuring out which platform the train would be on. Delhi station sucks! For one thing they dont even have proper boards showing which train is on which platform and the overhead walkway is so so high, its a real pain carrying all the luggage up. Our train was on platform 13 ( another unlucky number :-/, i seriously have my fingers crossed literally all the time. I couldnt help wondering if we really were getting on the right train, only when the TT left after checking the tickets did i breathe a sigh of relief)
We celebrated anish's bday on the train. Once Again, thanx to my (and aashish's) lack of foresight, we didnt have a knife to cut the cake. Jugaad to the rescue and after a rather sombre celebration, junta started getting ready to sleep. Sharada took her usual infi time to get the cleanest sheet, pillow and blanket and then setting up her berth. Anish pretended to be asleep barely minutes after cutting the cake. Guess he's still very sad about leaving vasudha. Aashish and aditya waited quite patiently while sharada had her fun with the bed before going up on their berths. Poor anvita was left waiting for ghaziabad to come as the TT had given the berth to some other guy till ghaziabad ... And now as i write this, someone has really farted a bad bad one :-/ :-/ why is this the only time i dont have a blocked nose!!
Anyway, digressed a bit there, (still obviously experiencing the post inter iit blues) so our ride from hauz khas to new delhi took about half an hour. I was sitting with anvita and she was on a roll. Some guy was playing music on his cell inside the metro and evidently its not allowed in delhi metros. And this gets anvita started " kaun dhakkan hai ye jo zorr zorr se gaane bajaa raha hai? " " Main zorr se isliye bol rahi hoon ki wo sune aur band kare" this even got the stranger guy next to us laughing :-) at ndls we walked walked and walked to get out of the metro station, then took some time in figuring out which platform the train would be on. Delhi station sucks! For one thing they dont even have proper boards showing which train is on which platform and the overhead walkway is so so high, its a real pain carrying all the luggage up. Our train was on platform 13 ( another unlucky number :-/, i seriously have my fingers crossed literally all the time. I couldnt help wondering if we really were getting on the right train, only when the TT left after checking the tickets did i breathe a sigh of relief)
We celebrated anish's bday on the train. Once Again, thanx to my (and aashish's) lack of foresight, we didnt have a knife to cut the cake. Jugaad to the rescue and after a rather sombre celebration, junta started getting ready to sleep. Sharada took her usual infi time to get the cleanest sheet, pillow and blanket and then setting up her berth. Anish pretended to be asleep barely minutes after cutting the cake. Guess he's still very sad about leaving vasudha. Aashish and aditya waited quite patiently while sharada had her fun with the bed before going up on their berths. Poor anvita was left waiting for ghaziabad to come as the TT had given the berth to some other guy till ghaziabad ... And now as i write this, someone has really farted a bad bad one :-/ :-/ why is this the only time i dont have a blocked nose!!
12.12.2009 - The First Match
The Morning of our first match ... This was why we were here! Finally the time had come ... Though it ws IIT Rajasthan only... still I couldnt help feeling excited ... Anish not having reached meant that I was sure to play atleast in the doubles :) The only pain was that our match was at 9AM in the morning .... and girls had their match at 11 AM... Kyuuuuuuuuuu..........!!! We would have to get up early .. I had to take a bath in the morning before the match to get rid of my drowsiness... Wen we reached the court, IIT Rajasthan was already practising...We knew it was goin to be a cake walk... got ready... I was playing the first singles, Mittal played the second and Aashish and I played our first doubles. Peacemaxx match.... Hardly anything I remember worth writing about ...
The girls had theirs against Guwahati... I forgot to mention in the previous post about Chili Chicken! So there was this chinki girl from Guwahati... for whom Chuunn had developed a "soft spot" ,,,, and we had an extended discussion the previous day about how there should not be a lot of Chili Chicken gravy... but a little bit of it is awesome! (people who whr thr.. Aashish and Chuunn will probably be able to make more of it... I was laughing at Chuun's description like mad!! )..
Back to the match ... Sharada won her singles peacefully as expected ... we were a bit worried about how Nidi would hold up... it was her first inter iit.. nd there would be crowd and shouting... plus we were also concerned a bit for her sevice ... But Nidi! ... was Awesome! She played her part to perfection near the net.. and the contest against Guwahati hardly turned out to be a contest at all ... Peaceful victories recorded in both sets of doubles too... and both the teams were almost certainly through to the knock out rounds ....
Minor mishap .... (only concerned me) ... Nidi had dropped Tang all over my new kit!!! I had taken infi efforts this time to pack my kit... and I could see it all falling apart in Tang powder!! x-( I was pissed!!
After the match, we went back to the hostel for lunch. The weather was really nice... The winter sunshine felt as nice as it is generally described in those romantic novels .. and I was all for sitting on the lawns... we decided to go to watch the cricket match against IITK ... Mittal, being GS, was concerned about other sports too and he was going there in any case....So all of us went to the cricket field...I cleaned up my kit... with minimal help from Sharada :P ... We watched the match for a while...
the others got bored in half an hr 2:30.. and they decided to leave... I expected atleast someone to stay .. but no one bothered! x-( Chuunn was the pioneer of "Going Back to Room Movement" ... He was tooooo sleepy.... I guess I had a good time though.. sitting in the sun... and thats when I started writing the diary about the camp time (which will be up soon)... The match ended by 3:30 and there was nothing else to do there... so I called up Mittal and he was at the TT court... I went along and sat with him .. TT junta were having a close one against Kanpur... They were leading 2-1 when I reached.. but Arnav lost his match against a guy from Kanpur who kept screaming "Yes Cmon! Yes Cmon!" after each point... as if he was winning the Championship point! Mittal and I had a good time there... egging him on... and shouting... We were surprised at how few people had turned up to cheer for Kanpur.... despite being the hosts... it seemed we were the only ones shouting ... the match was tied at 2-2 and Ketan was slated to play the last match .. the guy he was playing against looked very funny every time he served... he seemed to be setting his hair everytime he threw the ball up ... and served... Trust me .. it looked ridiculous... Ketan won his match and "Bombayyyyyyy!! Bombay!" echoed in the hall ... Mittal left to rest for sometime.. I really wasnt sleepy.. and knew that if I slept, I would remain sleeping for a long time... and then wont be able to sleep at night... which eventually would mean that I wont be fresh for the big match the next day ... so I stayed at the TT hall with Pritish and Neehar... watching the match between IITGandhinagar and IITG.. Rohan was playing ... he won peacefully in the end...
Sukhada arrives!
Infi pain maarke ek evening practice session jugaada tha.. Ravi Vikram Singh (the coordinator there) will probably remember me for the rest of his life for the infi pain I gave him .... first I got him to agree to a practice slot in the evening for Sukhada... but he permitted us to practice only till 8... (Anish was not going to reach by then)... then I asked for a practice slot in the morning at 6 .. to which he refused.. saying he could only give me one slot ... then ... Mittal talked to GS Kanpur... and asked him for a 6 o clock morning slot.. and he agreed... and then Ravi said no to the evening slot .... saying you already have a slot tomorrow morning .. in the mess, the court was emtpy... and the girls managed to play...
Sukhada, Sharada and Nidi took over an hour to come.. and I was left stranded at the court with nothing to do at all... finally they arrived .(Sukhada;s hunger was the cause of the delay and my intense boredom).. incidently, I came to know then that Sukhada also got EPFL intern.... CRACKK MAXX Sukhada! It took a while for Sukhada to get into rhythm .... It was almost 8:30 - 9 ... when Anish called up... "Abee.. main room pe pohoch gaya hoon... koi nai hai!" Aashish and Chuunn were in the canteen watching the match and Mittal had gone off for his meeting... I told him that I would be there in sometime .... and we winded up the practice session....
It ws awesome to have Anish back ... big match coming up tomorrow!~ ...Girls had dinner in the mess and then went off to their room... Chuunn and Aashish had been in the canteen all the time watching India defeat Sri Lanka in the T20.. so they werent very hungry... Room mein infi masti kiye ... we discussed perfectly GOD things.. like what if we lost to Kanpur? Then IITKGP would have to lose their match against Patna/Gandhinagar so that they dont have to face us in the quarters... then each time we got happy thinking about such things... one of us would bring us to back to the ground ... "abeee... quarters mein kgp se hi haar gaye to?! " and back to NBD!! But it was fun .. Anish had brought puri and sabzi from home... which formed a part of our dinner... the rest was in canteen ... We watched an episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S and then zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
The girls had theirs against Guwahati... I forgot to mention in the previous post about Chili Chicken! So there was this chinki girl from Guwahati... for whom Chuunn had developed a "soft spot" ,,,, and we had an extended discussion the previous day about how there should not be a lot of Chili Chicken gravy... but a little bit of it is awesome! (people who whr thr.. Aashish and Chuunn will probably be able to make more of it... I was laughing at Chuun's description like mad!! )..
Back to the match ... Sharada won her singles peacefully as expected ... we were a bit worried about how Nidi would hold up... it was her first inter iit.. nd there would be crowd and shouting... plus we were also concerned a bit for her sevice ... But Nidi! ... was Awesome! She played her part to perfection near the net.. and the contest against Guwahati hardly turned out to be a contest at all ... Peaceful victories recorded in both sets of doubles too... and both the teams were almost certainly through to the knock out rounds ....
Minor mishap .... (only concerned me) ... Nidi had dropped Tang all over my new kit!!! I had taken infi efforts this time to pack my kit... and I could see it all falling apart in Tang powder!! x-( I was pissed!!
After the match, we went back to the hostel for lunch. The weather was really nice... The winter sunshine felt as nice as it is generally described in those romantic novels .. and I was all for sitting on the lawns... we decided to go to watch the cricket match against IITK ... Mittal, being GS, was concerned about other sports too and he was going there in any case....So all of us went to the cricket field...I cleaned up my kit... with minimal help from Sharada :P ... We watched the match for a while...
the others got bored in half an hr 2:30.. and they decided to leave... I expected atleast someone to stay .. but no one bothered! x-( Chuunn was the pioneer of "Going Back to Room Movement" ... He was tooooo sleepy.... I guess I had a good time though.. sitting in the sun... and thats when I started writing the diary about the camp time (which will be up soon)... The match ended by 3:30 and there was nothing else to do there... so I called up Mittal and he was at the TT court... I went along and sat with him .. TT junta were having a close one against Kanpur... They were leading 2-1 when I reached.. but Arnav lost his match against a guy from Kanpur who kept screaming "Yes Cmon! Yes Cmon!" after each point... as if he was winning the Championship point! Mittal and I had a good time there... egging him on... and shouting... We were surprised at how few people had turned up to cheer for Kanpur.... despite being the hosts... it seemed we were the only ones shouting ... the match was tied at 2-2 and Ketan was slated to play the last match .. the guy he was playing against looked very funny every time he served... he seemed to be setting his hair everytime he threw the ball up ... and served... Trust me .. it looked ridiculous... Ketan won his match and "Bombayyyyyyy!! Bombay!" echoed in the hall ... Mittal left to rest for sometime.. I really wasnt sleepy.. and knew that if I slept, I would remain sleeping for a long time... and then wont be able to sleep at night... which eventually would mean that I wont be fresh for the big match the next day ... so I stayed at the TT hall with Pritish and Neehar... watching the match between IITGandhinagar and IITG.. Rohan was playing ... he won peacefully in the end...
Sukhada arrives!
Infi pain maarke ek evening practice session jugaada tha.. Ravi Vikram Singh (the coordinator there) will probably remember me for the rest of his life for the infi pain I gave him .... first I got him to agree to a practice slot in the evening for Sukhada... but he permitted us to practice only till 8... (Anish was not going to reach by then)... then I asked for a practice slot in the morning at 6 .. to which he refused.. saying he could only give me one slot ... then ... Mittal talked to GS Kanpur... and asked him for a 6 o clock morning slot.. and he agreed... and then Ravi said no to the evening slot .... saying you already have a slot tomorrow morning .. in the mess, the court was emtpy... and the girls managed to play...
Sukhada, Sharada and Nidi took over an hour to come.. and I was left stranded at the court with nothing to do at all... finally they arrived .(Sukhada;s hunger was the cause of the delay and my intense boredom).. incidently, I came to know then that Sukhada also got EPFL intern.... CRACKK MAXX Sukhada! It took a while for Sukhada to get into rhythm .... It was almost 8:30 - 9 ... when Anish called up... "Abee.. main room pe pohoch gaya hoon... koi nai hai!" Aashish and Chuunn were in the canteen watching the match and Mittal had gone off for his meeting... I told him that I would be there in sometime .... and we winded up the practice session....
It ws awesome to have Anish back ... big match coming up tomorrow!~ ...Girls had dinner in the mess and then went off to their room... Chuunn and Aashish had been in the canteen all the time watching India defeat Sri Lanka in the T20.. so they werent very hungry... Room mein infi masti kiye ... we discussed perfectly GOD things.. like what if we lost to Kanpur? Then IITKGP would have to lose their match against Patna/Gandhinagar so that they dont have to face us in the quarters... then each time we got happy thinking about such things... one of us would bring us to back to the ground ... "abeee... quarters mein kgp se hi haar gaye to?! " and back to NBD!! But it was fun .. Anish had brought puri and sabzi from home... which formed a part of our dinner... the rest was in canteen ... We watched an episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S and then zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
11.12.2009 - Official Opening Ceremony
Slept peacefully for the first time after coming to Kanpur... thanks to Mittal for moving in with Aashish and Chuunn... and I got to stay in a single room :) for a day atleast. Well, the morning started on a tricky note... Anish called and told me that his train was late by like 8 hours or something!... I was too sleepy probably to register what he was saying...Chuunn on the other hand was not ready to accept that this was happening. He bluntly said, Anish game le raha hoga apni. Mazaak kar raha hoga.. we couldn't do much about it anyways, so proceeded for practice after breakfast. The girls were actually reading books when we got there... Mera infi giveup hua dekhke ... subah subah baddy hall pe novels leke baithe the!! Practice was usual affair, Mittal was getting used to his new shoes. Rest of us just did some normal stuff. There was also a mini photo session on the stairs... random pics kheeche... people looking in the camre, people not looking in the camera, Chuunn pose ...
After our practice, we made our back to the hostel...and had juice on the way....as we reached the gate of the hostel, I realized I didn't have the keys to our room! Aashish said something about finding a single key on the steps in the court. I was pretty sure that it wasn't the key I was looking for as my key had a kinda keychain to it. In any case, I had to go back to the court to look for the keys. Sharada and Nidi were kind enough to accompany me back.. without much fuss... Nidi had a resigned expression on her face all the while...our trip proved fruitless. The key we found didn't work on my lock and in the process I missed my lunch. Mittal was infi angry as his tracksuit was inside the locked room and we had marchpast soon. Eventually, he wore Chuunn's tracksuit and Chuunn wore someone else's. He was complaining for a while... "ye kitna chhota hai". So at 2, we made our way to the main ground for the marchpast...on the way.. Chuun realized that probably Anish was not joking when he said that his train was delayed... "Katega to uska hi na... koi lene nai jaega usko" ... so we were resigned to the fact that Anish wont be playing against Rajasthan in any case. We reached the ground and IIT Hyderabad struck!!! One of the girls from IITH team was awesome! Most of the people around the stadium were drooling over her ... We were one of the first ones from IITB to reach the ground... and after a long long time everyone else arrived. We took our position on the ground. There were 15 IITs ... and it was going to be a looong looong marchpast. luckily the weather wasnt that bad ... and we dint feel the heat. (I guess it was real bad in madras ... whr it was all sunny and sweaty) ... IIT Bhubaneshwar was standing in front of us. They seemed to have brought the team prepared only for the marchpast... they had a small group and the way the contingent leader shouted commands, it seemed that they wanted to maximize their points in marchpast .. lots of cracks wr made in IITB contingent about how IITBh knew they wouldnt score a single point elsewhere... We din't even have 90% of the contingent as required... (i think some of the hockey guys were late)... The inspector came and started inspecting each and every contingent ... we did decently there... it was awesome fun to watch IITD ... they wr probably least prepared for the marchpast... IITG was doing pretty well ... by the time inspectors reached IITG, I had lost interest to see how the others were doing... it took a loong time ... and finally the music started... Sharada was leading the pack ... (without any placard! :P) IITB ws first in the lineup and thus got to walk the shortest distance. All the teams finished the marchpast and were finally seated. IITB contingent had already broken into groups by then and people were chatting around. I went and found Rohan and was chit chatting with him... There was a Malkham display ... (some crack from Chuunn/Aashish on this.. cant exactly remember) ... I chatted with Rohan for a while.. and the opening ceremny finally ended.... as we proceeded to ShopC, I suddenly realized I dint have my mobile with me. It had fallen on the grass when I was sitting and luckily no one had taken it! We went to ShopC after the ceremny mainly to get water ... It soooo sucked at Kanpur. .. there was no limit!! We had to get bisleris... Aashish, Chuunn, nidhi, Sharada and I went to the ShopC ... we got water bottles, new diary and a new lock .. (we would eventually have to break open the lock to my door)... We then proceeded to the basky ground ... Unbelievable atmosphere... IITB v/s IITM (nt sure) ... heard some of the awesomest comments passed .... there were guys with the following names written on their T-shirts
1) SNS
2) AURO
3) (and probably the bes of the lot) RECEPTOR
Baggji shouted.. .. "sab electonic devices band kar do!!!!!" Amazing time ... we had to leave half way through the match ... had to go for practice... before that, had to break open the door ...!! It was here that Chuunn met one of his friends and his greeting was "eenh eeeenh"! (if anybody gets that! :P :P... I m sure Aashish remembers!!)
So, it was time for the Mission LOCK! There was still no clue to where the keys of the lock had disappeared and there ws only one option left. Earlier me and Aashish had already brought a new lock). Mittal tried attacking the lock with a stone from the side.... it went on for sometime till the lock was disfigured but hardly seemed to give way. I called up Malpani for his inputs on how to break open a lock ... and he din'd provide us any valuable insights.
Sharada was the one who finally found a rod .. without which the lock wouldnt have opened. The rod was positioned and 2 shots from Mittal and the door opened! I dont think we did anything much after that ... We to the cour for a while... then returned ...
Dinner on the 11th was Awesome! We were a little late .. I was having dinner in the mess for the first time ... We sang songs all the time ... starting of "Chuunn Chala.. Chuunn Chala" and "Sharada->Shredder->Cheddar) .... it was awesome ... we were the last team sitting on the mess table... and singing and singing and singing ... Teraaaa Hone Lagaaa Hooon ....... Hone Lagaaaa Hoooooon ....... Jab Se Mila Hooooon........... Teeeeeeeeeraaaaaaaaaaaa............ one of the best nights in inter IIT!
After our practice, we made our back to the hostel...and had juice on the way....as we reached the gate of the hostel, I realized I didn't have the keys to our room! Aashish said something about finding a single key on the steps in the court. I was pretty sure that it wasn't the key I was looking for as my key had a kinda keychain to it. In any case, I had to go back to the court to look for the keys. Sharada and Nidi were kind enough to accompany me back.. without much fuss... Nidi had a resigned expression on her face all the while...our trip proved fruitless. The key we found didn't work on my lock and in the process I missed my lunch. Mittal was infi angry as his tracksuit was inside the locked room and we had marchpast soon. Eventually, he wore Chuunn's tracksuit and Chuunn wore someone else's. He was complaining for a while... "ye kitna chhota hai". So at 2, we made our way to the main ground for the marchpast...on the way.. Chuun realized that probably Anish was not joking when he said that his train was delayed... "Katega to uska hi na... koi lene nai jaega usko" ... so we were resigned to the fact that Anish wont be playing against Rajasthan in any case. We reached the ground and IIT Hyderabad struck!!! One of the girls from IITH team was awesome! Most of the people around the stadium were drooling over her ... We were one of the first ones from IITB to reach the ground... and after a long long time everyone else arrived. We took our position on the ground. There were 15 IITs ... and it was going to be a looong looong marchpast. luckily the weather wasnt that bad ... and we dint feel the heat. (I guess it was real bad in madras ... whr it was all sunny and sweaty) ... IIT Bhubaneshwar was standing in front of us. They seemed to have brought the team prepared only for the marchpast... they had a small group and the way the contingent leader shouted commands, it seemed that they wanted to maximize their points in marchpast .. lots of cracks wr made in IITB contingent about how IITBh knew they wouldnt score a single point elsewhere... We din't even have 90% of the contingent as required... (i think some of the hockey guys were late)... The inspector came and started inspecting each and every contingent ... we did decently there... it was awesome fun to watch IITD ... they wr probably least prepared for the marchpast... IITG was doing pretty well ... by the time inspectors reached IITG, I had lost interest to see how the others were doing... it took a loong time ... and finally the music started... Sharada was leading the pack ... (without any placard! :P) IITB ws first in the lineup and thus got to walk the shortest distance. All the teams finished the marchpast and were finally seated. IITB contingent had already broken into groups by then and people were chatting around. I went and found Rohan and was chit chatting with him... There was a Malkham display ... (some crack from Chuunn/Aashish on this.. cant exactly remember) ... I chatted with Rohan for a while.. and the opening ceremny finally ended.... as we proceeded to ShopC, I suddenly realized I dint have my mobile with me. It had fallen on the grass when I was sitting and luckily no one had taken it! We went to ShopC after the ceremny mainly to get water ... It soooo sucked at Kanpur. .. there was no limit!! We had to get bisleris... Aashish, Chuunn, nidhi, Sharada and I went to the ShopC ... we got water bottles, new diary and a new lock .. (we would eventually have to break open the lock to my door)... We then proceeded to the basky ground ... Unbelievable atmosphere... IITB v/s IITM (nt sure) ... heard some of the awesomest comments passed .... there were guys with the following names written on their T-shirts
1) SNS
2) AURO
3) (and probably the bes of the lot) RECEPTOR
Baggji shouted.. .. "sab electonic devices band kar do!!!!!" Amazing time ... we had to leave half way through the match ... had to go for practice... before that, had to break open the door ...!! It was here that Chuunn met one of his friends and his greeting was "eenh eeeenh"! (if anybody gets that! :P :P... I m sure Aashish remembers!!)
So, it was time for the Mission LOCK! There was still no clue to where the keys of the lock had disappeared and there ws only one option left. Earlier me and Aashish had already brought a new lock). Mittal tried attacking the lock with a stone from the side.... it went on for sometime till the lock was disfigured but hardly seemed to give way. I called up Malpani for his inputs on how to break open a lock ... and he din'd provide us any valuable insights.
Sharada was the one who finally found a rod .. without which the lock wouldnt have opened. The rod was positioned and 2 shots from Mittal and the door opened! I dont think we did anything much after that ... We to the cour for a while... then returned ...
Dinner on the 11th was Awesome! We were a little late .. I was having dinner in the mess for the first time ... We sang songs all the time ... starting of "Chuunn Chala.. Chuunn Chala" and "Sharada->Shredder->Cheddar) .... it was awesome ... we were the last team sitting on the mess table... and singing and singing and singing ... Teraaaa Hone Lagaaa Hooon ....... Hone Lagaaaa Hoooooon ....... Jab Se Mila Hooooon........... Teeeeeeeeeraaaaaaaaaaaa............ one of the best nights in inter IIT!
10.12.2009
Early Morning 10 o clock practice slot! We felt that the one hour slot will not be enough, so as we were going to sleep, we had decided that we would leave the rooms at 8:30 and by 9 o clock go to the court. I couldnt sleep well that night. First, Mittal was on phone for a loon loong time(initially outside the room) so I got to keep the fan on and sleep for a while. At 2 in the night, I woke up and the fan was off. Tried sleeping without the fan but it didnt work out. Finally by 3:30, I'd had enuff and turned on the fan. Slept peacefully after that :) I woke up when Sharada and Nidhi were outside our room asking for food coupons. It was already 8:15, well past the time I had decided I would get up... (but its excused .. I hadnt slept well :P ). I did get a lot of snide comments from some ppl "aap to 8:30 court jaane wale the!" We managed to reach court by around 9:30. and the court was bathed in sunlight! (alrite... its an exaggeration .. :) but yeah... sunlight found its way on a non-negligible part of the 3rd court. ) Jitesh said that the shoe-fellow couldnt come in the morning and would probably make it in the evening. Mittal got Sidharth's shoes instead. We also found that we had no boxes with us. All our shuttle boxes were with the insti kit and all of them were out somewhr. We told Edwin sir that we would need the boxes, but it seemed like we would have to get thru this practice slot without shuttles... Eventually, we borrowed shuttles from the Kanpur team. I was feeling pretty embarrassed by then... first shoes...then shuttles ... what next... I wondered...I dint have to wait long for an answer as halfway into the practice, Mittal asked Jitesh to tell the show-fellow to get wristbands, socks too. So, apart from rackets, we had officially for everything related to Badminton that could be asked for. Wow! Talk about coming prepared... especially a Gold Winning Team! The practice session was nice. I did some shadows and shuttle run, and got a better feel of the court. Was finally able to move around as I liked. Dont remember a lot about the session apart from that. Mittal and I played a singles in which Mittal was leading 19-11... and he lost it from there :P :P :P ! We headed back to our hostel. All I remember about 10th was that we were sleeping for most of the day. In the evening, I had a chat with my friend from Nagpur. AA Bhaiya was sitting all the while listening to us... dunno how he dint get bored with our nonsense... We went to meet that shoe-fellow finally. Mittal got shoes, grips, wristbands, socks ... Mittal paid for everything... and started walking back to hostel... completely forgetting to take his new shoes with him! we went back to the mess. Outside the mess, KGP team had arrived. On seeing the KGP team, Mittal tried hiding his new shoes...(kept it on the floor beside the mess gate! What a plce to hide!!) I met my nemesis again... (@Mittal: This time.. not only mine :P ). We got talking and came to know that Angam and Abhijeet had been practising (Nervousnesss!!!!) We told Abhijeet that Anish dint come with us because of his brother's marriage and he was aghast! Completely violated "Anish ne bataya bhi nai Amit bhaiya ki shaadi ho rahi hai!!" and we said" Humko to invitation cards bhi mile! :P " By time time we finished chatting with them, Mittal had forgotten all about his shoes again! We decided to hv some fun and sent his shoes to TT team's room with Ketan. We all went to canteen after that and as we were eating, Mittal suddenly realized his shoes were missing ... AGAIN! After seeing him worked up for sometime, we told him that his shoes were "TAKEN CARE OF" ...
At night, Apurv came and set up the LAN settings on Mittal's lappy. We watched a couple of episodes of FRIENDS and slept off ... Pretty uneventful day as I recall it .. .
Does anybody remember anything else that happened?!
At night, Apurv came and set up the LAN settings on Mittal's lappy. We watched a couple of episodes of FRIENDS and slept off ... Pretty uneventful day as I recall it .. .
Does anybody remember anything else that happened?!
09/12/2009: Arrival at Kanpur
We were scheduled to arrive at Kanpur at 6:40 in the morning. By the time others woke me up, most of them were already packed and ready to get down (which effectively meant that I had to get up straightaway and couldn’t laze around for 5-10 minutes). So, I got everything packed, and even before I could brush my teeth and freshen up, we were at Kanpur. After unloading everything, the train was still at the station. So I got back into the train to brush my teeth. And suddenly, there was a horn. I immediately got down; with the brush in my mouth thinking our train was going to leave. It turned out that the train on the next platform was leaving, so I got back and completed my activities. Everybody was damn sleepy. Nidi was talking to her friend on the Kanpur station. As we were leaving from the station, I found it I actually knew that guy from Nagpur. We got on the IITK buses and there was a head count going on. Funnily, in the head count, there was an extra guy! Mittal and Reddy were laughing their heads off while trying to figure out how this was possible. As soon as the bus started, I slept, and slept soo soundly that I directly woke up when the bus stopped outside Hall 2 of IITK. I don’t remember a second of that journey. An interesting change from the last year… there was no “Mr. Lova Lova” at every point in the journey! We were shocked to see their hostels. They had proper modern buildings for their hostels, not like some 50s building in which we live. And the rooms … OMG! Huge double room, almost 2.5x the size of our holes in IITB. 2 tables, 2 cupboards, 2 tubelights everything! It was enough to make me think that we live in prison cells in bbay with the minor improvement of having a door in place of steel bars. The rooms were not yet allotted team-wise so we thought we could just grab any 2 rooms for the baddy team. Aashish, Chuun and I put our luggage in 2 rooms on the second floor and went off for breakfast. Their mess was also amazing, nice shiny flooring, some random equipment for keeping the used plates, almost looked Gullu to me. The only trouble with breakfast in the mess (and this was only for n-veg ppl) was the omelet guy. He used to make 1 omelet at a time and so would take infi time per person and the line would grow on and on and on. The water at Kanpur was horrible. It tasted all weird (we found out later that it was hard water) but yeah, it was clear we would not be able to drink it regularly. After lunch, Sharada, Aashish, Chuunn, Nidi and me went off in search of the baddy courts. Marchpast practice was scheduled for 4 PM, so Mittal was forbidding us to go. But we went anyways … and we took a long route to the new SAC. On the way, we saw the new hostels (or Halls as they call in Kanpur) and I was once again very pissed. Why do they get to live in such good building?!!? We tried to find solace in the fact that it would be verrry hot in Kanpur in summers and walking around the campus will be such a huge pain as compared to IITB. The new SAC was still in the process of being made ready for the matches. It looked an impressive building all the same. Inside, IITK people were practicing. I was shocked to see an awesome player inside who wasn’t in the team last year. According to our info, no new member had made it to IITK team. The familiar sense of imminent doom borne out of guilt of not practicing hard enough and taking for granted that we would win (that I have so well come to associate with the Inter IIT Days) came over me. I breathed a little easier when I found out that the GOD player was not from IIT and had been called just for practice. All the same, it was clear that Kanpur could be a pain! (they have a full-time coach, they had a camera and a laptop in the hall itself and to top it all, they had called players from outside to practice! And … and… Anish was out of practice) Thus began the many upswings and downswings of my confidence over the next 9 days. Jitesh came and talked to us. We asked him to arrange for shoes for Mittal. He was saying that some guy would come with the shoes in the evening. They had also given us a practice slot for that afternoon (which we eventually got shifted to evening 6:30 after the marchpast practice). The rooms were being allotted. We had rooms 219 and 220 for the baddy team. Once Anish came, Mittal was going to move in with the squash guys. We got our luggage out from the second floor room and placed it outside 220. Bored of waiting for the keys, I went down to the Warden’s Office where Mittal and Reddy were sitting surrounded by all the secys, some IITK orgies and a bunch of keys. It was all random. They didn’t have keys to all the rooms, some rooms had 3 keys, and some guy used to come running once in a while “240 ki mil gai”. It was clear that it would be a while before everything got sorted out. Aashish also came down and sat for a while. We got bored then and decided to go to the Shopping Center to get our phones recharged. Chuunn was sitting outside the room with all the luggage. So aashish and me made a quick trip to the ShopC and got our phones working again. By the time we returned, Mittal had found the keys to our rooms thankfully and we got the luggage moved. We then had lunch in the mess. (was OK as far as I remember.. nothing great). Mittal called up Apurv Nakade to let him know that we’d reached IITK. I was shocked at the way Mittal introduced me to Apurv. I grabbed the phone from him and told him I was Raunak from Nagpur and he understood. We slept for a while, atleast I tried to… Mittal was continuously bugged by people from different teams for god knows what all and if nothing, he was on phone. At 4, all of us got ready for the marchpast practice and assembled in front of Hall 2. Edwin sir was also there. There was still confusion going on over when Sukhada would come. I don’t remember exactly what the situation was on 9th but it concerned Pappu, Sukhada’s parents and Edwin sir. Eventually it was decided that Edwin sir would talk to Sukhada’s parents the next day. Sir then came up with a customary “Edwin-sir” joke. He asked me to call up Anish and tell him that he need not come as we would play Sharada as our fifth player. I had a talk with Anish and confirmed when he was reaching. Then we walked to the cricket ground where the marchpast practice was to be held. It seemed soo funny and embarrassing to be walking with such a big contingent with everyone in proper attire and practising for MARCHPAST!!! Reddy had new commands to teach us “Khula Line Chal” and “Nikat Line Chal”. When I first heard the commands, I couldn’t make a head or tail out of it. I thought it was something in gulti that he was shouting. Eventually, I could make out what he was trying to say. Anyways, the practice was a very weird situation. There was IITK students on the ground, who probably would laugh their heads off as soon as we left. But, we continued our practice, deriving some sort of pleasure in our shamelessness. :P It was easily the best practice that we’d done (probably because everyone wanted to get over with it as soon as possible). It was really funny to hear one of the coaches say “Remember your positions for day after”…. As if that was going to happen in a contingent of 100 odd people!!! Chuunn would get random moments of enthu during the marchpast and would start shout “ek do ek” at the top of his voice suddenly for a while, and then would stop. The series of “Lasts of Inter IIT 2009” had already begun. Our last marchpast practice of Inter IIT 2009. (Though not many would be very sad about that :P) We got ready and went for practice after the marchpast. Mittal couldn’t play much as he didn’t have his shoes. I found the court really tough to move on. It was not slippery at all and going near the net seemed like a real pain. I did some shadows to get my movement right, but didn’t help a lot. The first toss I attempted, I completely missed the shuttle. Another out of nervousness followed. The shuttle seemed to be coming extra slow on this court (which was expected as they had a much bigger hall as compared to us…. Still I couldn’t help thinking “What if we just don’t get accustomed to the flight!?”) It was also kinda cold inside the court and the shuttle seemed to be drifting. (I found out later that it was because a window was open which I couldn’t locate earlier). The lighting was horrible! It came straight in the eye along the side lobby and also reflected off the court at certain places. Aashish wasn;t too happy with the court and his game too. Interestingly, Mittal didn’t have a single pain with all this. He claimed that his height was optimal for the court :P. Girls seemed to be having pains too. Sharada was hardly moving on the court. Nidi has a weird fascination for hitting the net repeatedly. Every time the shuttle got stuck in the net, she would derive great pleasure in hitting the net repeatedly to get it out. Chuunn on the other hand was perfectly happy with the court and the flight. He was saying over and over again “Masst lag raha hai yahaaan khelke” He was able to hit almost every shot to his liking. Thus ended our first practice session in Kanpur. In any case, it wasn’t the most encouraging practice session we had. For one thing, not all four of us could even play together, because of the shoe problem. We left the court around 9- 9:30 and I think we went to the Campus Restaurent for dinner. Mittal didn’t accompany us as he had board meeting. I liked the food in Campus Restaurant. All of us ordered sweet corn soup which felt awesome with a lot of pepper in our sore throats. Funniest thing was, Sharada and I ordered Aalu matar at first, but the waiter told us that he couldn’t make it as he didn’t have any peas. When later I asked if he could make green peas pulao, he said he could! Eventually, my green peas pulao didn’t have a single pea! It still tasted good though. We walked all the way back to the hostel and I called up Ravi Vikram Singh (the coordinator for Baddy and TT) for practice slots for the next day. (Early morning .. Eghhhh ). I had one of the many fights I would have over the fan with Mittal. Eventually, I gave up and he did not switch on the fan. But …. But … when I couldn’t sleep till 3 in the morning, I switched on the fan and slept peacefully. :)
08/12/2009 : Leaving for Kanpur
I finally begin to write today for the blog for inter IIT 2009. I guess I have been trying to put it off for a while because it is still painful to remember about inter iit and makes me wish I was there again. Somehow it means acknowledging for sure that Inter IIT is OVER. But I guess if I don’t writing soon I will start forgetting all the details… presenting Inter IIT 2009 …
08/12/2009: Leaving for Kanpur
We were scheduled to leave for CST at 5:30 AM. I remembered reading 5:30 on the notices put up and got it confused with the reporting time. So, at 5:10 I was sitting peacefully in my room, all packed and ready, pretty pleased with myself for getting everything done well in time when Mittal called… and informed me that reporting time was 5 AM. (I also got an earful of why I was always late and why I always have all sorts of wrong information :P). So, I left hurriedly for SAC. On the way, Aashish joined me from H5. We walked all the way to SAC with the luggage (including all the tracksuits and team t-shirts, so it was a bit of a pain but I was too excited then to understand what was going on). We reached SAC and started loading our luggage. There were name tags for our luggage there with strings. And there was tea and biscuits. We were waiting for Chuunn to reach, when we found out that Mittal’s shoes were with him. When Chuunn came, Mittal asked for his shoes, but he didn’t have them. So they figured out that shoes will be in Chuunn’s car when Dude had come. So, Chuunn left for his home to get Mittal’s shoes while we got on into the bus. Chuunn couldn’t find the shoes even in the car and we were forced to leave without them. Our buses finally left SAC and we were off!! We stopped at H10 for the girls… Coach was there but in all the confusion of soo many people leaving we couldn’t meet her. She called on the bus and wished us luck. I don’t remember much of the journey except discussing for a while what Mittal will do now without his shoes and sleeping. We reached CST and it wasn’t the normal CST station that we saw. I think we were entering from the backside of the station or something. I couldn’t recognize the station. As soon as we got down from the buses, Chuunn made it clear to Sharada “I am sorry Sharada but main to sone wala hoon”. We got our seats from Mittal and proceeded to the platform. I was still marveling at how easy my new kit made my life. Carrying luggage around didn’t seem like a pain at all.
We had our train from platform 15(I think, not sure). All the baddy seats were scattered in 3 compartments. We were figuring out how to get all of our seats together. We didn’t want the last compartment of the bogie as there would be people coming constantly and the smell. We wanted the second compartment. There was this group of 4 people led by “Lungi” who was coming from a marriage. They had big big containers with them. Lungi was hesitant to move. He didn’t say outright that he didn’t want to move but kept making excuses for an hour, saying that he is waiting for his people to come and move the stuff. Meanwhile we got breakfast. Chuunn was verrry hungry and brought 6 non vegs and 5 veg breakfast for 4 non veg and 2 veg people! Veg had bread and cutlet… it was too dry. In the end I think 3 veg breakfast were wasted. When Lungi was still unconvinced after we’d finished our breakfasts, Aashish got impatient. Wo chhadh gaye Lungi pe (no idea how to frame that in English!) “kahaan hai aapke log? Kab aaenge? AAdhi ghate se aa hi rahe hain kya? Finally Lungi got fed up and agreed to move. And we had all the seats together! As expected, after all this eating, moving,re-settling Chuunn, Aashish and Mittal slept off.
Nidhi, Sharada and I were reading books. It was reminding me of the morning of the return journey from Madras. Nice relaxing morning, sitting by the window and reading a novel. After sometime, others started getting up, and we had biryani for lunch. But it was mostly evening before we started doing anything fun. I’d dozed off in the afternoon and I got up to the sounds of “Chuunn Hero hai!, Chuunn ne bacha liya!!” Turns out, Nidhi had endured a 2 hour session of “getting to know” the footer team :P when Chuunn stepped up. He went over to the footer team and told Nidhi “Nidhi, your dad is getting frantic, he’s trying to talk to you since the last hour and a half” and Chuunn the Savior had arrived!! He was infinitely pleased with himself!
The TT team came over and we played DumbC for a while. I saw some of the most entertaining and innovative acting in DumbC ever. Chuunn cracked GuftGu! His acting of GuftGu was simply unbelievable... specially the Gu part ... :P Mittal crackked Chandalika... (his expression to denote licking still remains etched on my memory! reminds me of Tom's expression in Tom and Jerry with his tougue out and saliva dripping :P) Probably the best was his idea for exorcist. Though we guessed it without that idea being put into use, it was truly brilliant. Mittal was going to show the XOR gate for the starting of the movie. He was most enthusiastic when it came to acting. I was tooo lazy to act (and more importantly after seeing such GOD acting, I was nt sure if I would be able to live up to the level!)
(I cant remember any more movies, please add in the comments)
We then had a great time playing MAFIA. Sharada got to be the MAFIA for like 5 times in a row. Each time the voting round started, first suspicions were always on Ayesha. The one time she became MAFIA, her expressions showed that she was scared to death! Aashish and Kunal were playing it for the first time. Every time Mittal became MAFIA, he would get all shrill and defensive and loud. Arunav was playing an awesome GOD until his voice went off completely and Pritish took over for a while. Ketan was made to sit out of one round of MAFIA as a punishment for spoiling the game 2-3 times. (He was near to tears while begging to be allowed to play :P) He was more interested in eating the food which someone was going to get in Bhopal. We had a photo session (which Ketan enjoyed a lot :P he didn’t get to be in any of the pics) and then dinner.
We restarted MAFIA but by then TT team was too tired to play and Mittal had to be on the phone. Later we found out that cricket and footer teams were sitting in groups and were “entertaining” the freshies while we were playing our little MAFIA game. Mittal was like “Dayaa bhe! Apan MAFIA khel rahe the and wahaan freshie ki le rahe the! Kya fart hai!” :P We had to get up early the next morning at 7 to get down at Kanpur. Kanpur was not the last station on the route... so there was a non-trivial anxiety about whether we would all manage to wake up and get down at Kanpur.
Thus ended our first day of the tour …
08/12/2009: Leaving for Kanpur
We were scheduled to leave for CST at 5:30 AM. I remembered reading 5:30 on the notices put up and got it confused with the reporting time. So, at 5:10 I was sitting peacefully in my room, all packed and ready, pretty pleased with myself for getting everything done well in time when Mittal called… and informed me that reporting time was 5 AM. (I also got an earful of why I was always late and why I always have all sorts of wrong information :P). So, I left hurriedly for SAC. On the way, Aashish joined me from H5. We walked all the way to SAC with the luggage (including all the tracksuits and team t-shirts, so it was a bit of a pain but I was too excited then to understand what was going on). We reached SAC and started loading our luggage. There were name tags for our luggage there with strings. And there was tea and biscuits. We were waiting for Chuunn to reach, when we found out that Mittal’s shoes were with him. When Chuunn came, Mittal asked for his shoes, but he didn’t have them. So they figured out that shoes will be in Chuunn’s car when Dude had come. So, Chuunn left for his home to get Mittal’s shoes while we got on into the bus. Chuunn couldn’t find the shoes even in the car and we were forced to leave without them. Our buses finally left SAC and we were off!! We stopped at H10 for the girls… Coach was there but in all the confusion of soo many people leaving we couldn’t meet her. She called on the bus and wished us luck. I don’t remember much of the journey except discussing for a while what Mittal will do now without his shoes and sleeping. We reached CST and it wasn’t the normal CST station that we saw. I think we were entering from the backside of the station or something. I couldn’t recognize the station. As soon as we got down from the buses, Chuunn made it clear to Sharada “I am sorry Sharada but main to sone wala hoon”. We got our seats from Mittal and proceeded to the platform. I was still marveling at how easy my new kit made my life. Carrying luggage around didn’t seem like a pain at all.
We had our train from platform 15(I think, not sure). All the baddy seats were scattered in 3 compartments. We were figuring out how to get all of our seats together. We didn’t want the last compartment of the bogie as there would be people coming constantly and the smell. We wanted the second compartment. There was this group of 4 people led by “Lungi” who was coming from a marriage. They had big big containers with them. Lungi was hesitant to move. He didn’t say outright that he didn’t want to move but kept making excuses for an hour, saying that he is waiting for his people to come and move the stuff. Meanwhile we got breakfast. Chuunn was verrry hungry and brought 6 non vegs and 5 veg breakfast for 4 non veg and 2 veg people! Veg had bread and cutlet… it was too dry. In the end I think 3 veg breakfast were wasted. When Lungi was still unconvinced after we’d finished our breakfasts, Aashish got impatient. Wo chhadh gaye Lungi pe (no idea how to frame that in English!) “kahaan hai aapke log? Kab aaenge? AAdhi ghate se aa hi rahe hain kya? Finally Lungi got fed up and agreed to move. And we had all the seats together! As expected, after all this eating, moving,re-settling Chuunn, Aashish and Mittal slept off.
Nidhi, Sharada and I were reading books. It was reminding me of the morning of the return journey from Madras. Nice relaxing morning, sitting by the window and reading a novel. After sometime, others started getting up, and we had biryani for lunch. But it was mostly evening before we started doing anything fun. I’d dozed off in the afternoon and I got up to the sounds of “Chuunn Hero hai!, Chuunn ne bacha liya!!” Turns out, Nidhi had endured a 2 hour session of “getting to know” the footer team :P when Chuunn stepped up. He went over to the footer team and told Nidhi “Nidhi, your dad is getting frantic, he’s trying to talk to you since the last hour and a half” and Chuunn the Savior had arrived!! He was infinitely pleased with himself!
The TT team came over and we played DumbC for a while. I saw some of the most entertaining and innovative acting in DumbC ever. Chuunn cracked GuftGu! His acting of GuftGu was simply unbelievable... specially the Gu part ... :P Mittal crackked Chandalika... (his expression to denote licking still remains etched on my memory! reminds me of Tom's expression in Tom and Jerry with his tougue out and saliva dripping :P) Probably the best was his idea for exorcist. Though we guessed it without that idea being put into use, it was truly brilliant. Mittal was going to show the XOR gate for the starting of the movie. He was most enthusiastic when it came to acting. I was tooo lazy to act (and more importantly after seeing such GOD acting, I was nt sure if I would be able to live up to the level!)
(I cant remember any more movies, please add in the comments)
We then had a great time playing MAFIA. Sharada got to be the MAFIA for like 5 times in a row. Each time the voting round started, first suspicions were always on Ayesha. The one time she became MAFIA, her expressions showed that she was scared to death! Aashish and Kunal were playing it for the first time. Every time Mittal became MAFIA, he would get all shrill and defensive and loud. Arunav was playing an awesome GOD until his voice went off completely and Pritish took over for a while. Ketan was made to sit out of one round of MAFIA as a punishment for spoiling the game 2-3 times. (He was near to tears while begging to be allowed to play :P) He was more interested in eating the food which someone was going to get in Bhopal. We had a photo session (which Ketan enjoyed a lot :P he didn’t get to be in any of the pics) and then dinner.
We restarted MAFIA but by then TT team was too tired to play and Mittal had to be on the phone. Later we found out that cricket and footer teams were sitting in groups and were “entertaining” the freshies while we were playing our little MAFIA game. Mittal was like “Dayaa bhe! Apan MAFIA khel rahe the and wahaan freshie ki le rahe the! Kya fart hai!” :P We had to get up early the next morning at 7 to get down at Kanpur. Kanpur was not the last station on the route... so there was a non-trivial anxiety about whether we would all manage to wake up and get down at Kanpur.
Thus ended our first day of the tour …
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