Map of Puketopia

WARNING: Do not read this post, when you eat. It is ok for Pregnant women to read this post as they are used to vomiting.

This is an incident involving a few of my friends but unfortunately I wasn’t present in this situation when it happened. So I am narrating it from a third person who heared it from the friend’s cousin perspective.

It was a fine evening in Chennai. An evening that could have been spent relaxing at the beach or playing in the nearby ground, but they decided to spend the time boozing at a local bar. This local bar is of the local kind which people in Tamil Nadu call it as “Wine shop” and pronounce is as “Voyin shaap”. It is all driven by the economics. Depending on how much money they can pool in they go to a 3 star hotel pub like the Tinto at Residency inn or a decent pub or a billiards club and if the money is tight they end up in this particular Wine Shop. There is no preference or differentiation of class when it comes to boozing. After all we were in college and we had only so many things to think about – booze, girls, more booze.

So on this fine evening my friends started their pooja (code word for boozing) in one such local wine shop. Just like the wheels on the bus go round and round and the Cycle of life goes round and round, glasses of whiskey and vodka go round and round, sometimes mixed with pepsi, sometimes with coke, sometimes with water from water packet, sometimes in RAW Format (not the Camera RAW), and in some weird times it can go around with Orange Juice, especially if you are in USA and you have exhausted your supply of soda cans and you have no other choice but do the mixing with Breakfast items!

And as it settles and goes, the first round is usually an initial slight jolt. It warms up everyone, relaxes them. It puts them in a mood of laughter and it slowly increases the steam and volume of their voice. After the second round, people forget the count. They can no longer keep track of the rounds and hence after Round 2, the count never goes up. It’s like those film actresses who celebrate their 28th birthday for 20 times.

The topic of discussion changes from politics to Internal Affairs. People start speaking their mind out. The family, the girl next door, the girl in the opposite door, the girl who closes the door, the girl who never opens the door, the girl who slapped him (twice), the girl who gave him halwa (and he gave Mixture (pronounced as Mikchar) in return), in short the discussion of Internal Affairs has always been about girls and how the guy loves her so much or how he lost her to another guy who had a car. While some of them come only to drink with no Internal Affairs to discuss, others come only to eat side dishes. They are designated Side dish eaters, Like me. Hey, I was a good boy, I can’t publicly tarnish my own image or risk going back home with “Boozer” written on my forehead.

So, as the rounds went by, with people losing count and not knowing when the barrel becomes full, one of them stops talking. No speech, closed mouth, eyes looking at the top and head slowly whirling. At this point he slowly points his hand to the fan and requests it to be turned on. People around him ask what happened, and why is he pointing to the fan as it was already on and running fine. In the next second, his mouth blasts open and a huge map of the motherland is laid out on the table with puke.

The waiter comes and calmly cleans the mess, they are used to it. But after the cleaning he doesn’t move.

“Oh, here is 20 Rupees!” hands out one of the Side dish eater.

“Saar, extra give saar!” asks the waiter politely.

“En paa?” (Why man?)

“Saar, Vaanthi perusa irunthichu saar!” (The Vomit was big)

Another side dish only eater hands out 10 more rupees and makes him happy. But just as he is about to leave, he calls him back and says

“Hey, you cleaned up the Map of India, but you missed Sri Lanka!” pointing to a small portion of puke left out on the table.

Atleast they got something out of the extra money that they gave and hence the Map of Puketopia was drawn and withdrawn.

MORAL OF THE STORY: When you do something, do it completely. Never leave a residue.

Random Access Memories

Do not worry, this is not a highly technical article on RAMs and their size and bus speed (Which is not the speed of bus number 23c or 47A). It is a Tag on memories from Usha at Agelessbonding.

Memory has always fascinated me. A Human brain can hold so much information that no discounted online retail store’s Tera Byte hard disks can hold. Yet sometimes it is hard to remember what you ate yesterday for lunch. We tend to remember things in the order of significance to ourselves and those that are important to us. I still remember my first bicycle that I used to go around Madurai but I may or may not remember by friend’s first bicycle. So here goes the tag:

MY OLDEST MEMORY:

I remember my Kindergarten days. It was a small home based school by the street corner of our house. My Paternal Grandma used to take me to that school everyday and she would bring me home for lunch. I remember the summer days when I used to have Mangoes with lunch. There was a test that we were taking once and I was using a pencil to write. I pressed the pencil so hard that the lead broke and I was trying to write with the small left over lead really hard. I have no idea how I did in that test and how many marks I scored.

TEN YEARS AGO:

Warning: Alcohol consumption is injurious to health.

I was in my Final year of College. I had a Job in hand from the campus interview and this was when I had tasted my first beer. It was awful, I had to brush my teeth to get rid of the stink from my mouth. We used to go for treats every time one of our friends were selected in a Job interview. When the cash flow is high we used to go to the Pub at Residency inn (Tinto it is called I think) and when the cash flow is really low, we would go to a local wine shop called Om Sakthi Wines and have fun at the Besant Nagar Beach. Me and my best friend didn’t drink. We kept accounts and gobbled up the side dishes.

MY FIRST THOUGHT IN THE MORNING:

Thank God it’s Friday

IF YOU BUILT A TIME CAPSULE WHAT WOULD IT CONTAIN:

iMac, iPod, Universal Power adapter and Some amount of Hope that where I go, there will be an Internet Connection and my iMac will not be too outdated.

THIS YEAR:

It has been a hectic year so far, but I have enjoyed every bit of it with my family.

14 YEARS FROM NOW:

I would be about 44 years old and I don’t care where I would be or What I would work on or How much I would be earning, but as long as I lead a simple peaceful life with my family, that is all I need.

Update: In a memory tag, I forgot to tag at the end of the post. I will leave it open for anyone to take it. I am not tagging any one in particular yet I don’t mean to tag every one. You take the tag if you like.

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