May 22, 2006

When elevators get interesting .....

Hello folks… The last few weeks have been really rough. Which partly explains the dearth of activity on this page. I have been working on my own version of 'Jhalak Diklaa jaa' *. Its going to be a blend of 'The Rover', 'White Rabbit' and of course Reshammiya's unprecedented hit number. You know, doing my bit to make Zeppelin and Airplane popular in rural India. And of course this way, I too will stand tall in the list of zealous rip roaring fans who have pledged their allegiance to Mr Himesh.

There has been a lot of learning too. I have been seeing a couple of gorgeous women swooning all over Reshammiya in one of his videos. I knew that love was blind and all (most of my friends have girlfriends/boyfriends and that explains it ) but now I know, love is DEAF as well.I'm sure that one fine day our man is going to choke on his own vomit and die. Who then will inherit his cap ? A tough question that.

Anyway, amidst all this hullabaloo, I had a chance of being a part of a tragic real life elevator fairy tale. It is the oldest tale of them all. Boy meets girl in an elevator. Boy and girl part ways. Boy gets back to java.util.Hashtable. Girl will someday get married to a hard-working, dosh-earning, lassi-drinking, groundnut-eating, hindifilm-watching, java-coding software engineer and they both try to live happily ever after.

Now elevators have been known to display a unique property. Just like the crystalline forms of tetra-methyl-tri-acetone-tri-peroxide. In India, they are the only legitimate closed cabins where people do not draw any conclusions if they see two people of opposite sex coming out of them ( Restrooms could have been a possibility but then God had other ideas.) I mean if the grand-aunt from Patiala chances upon her grand-neice coming out of a lift along with a non-female, the grand-neice will not be ripped of her chances of getting some "decent" software engineer matches. I think.

But more often than not, the other person(s) travelling with you is least likely to be interesting. Often, most of them are people who CAN grow moustaches. And it is even likely that you might bump into your project manager. In which case, the author avoids all eye-contact by appearing really busy and occupied by sending blank SMS messages to himself. But sometimes, 'sometimes' being the key word here, elevators do get interesting.

A few days ago, I was travelling by our office elevator along with a fine young lady from work. She didn’t know me but ofcourse I knew her. hee hee hee(I believe you know the theory here...). The lift has a mirror attached to one of the walls so that you get to know your "aukad" before you start playing with fire. I took a short glimpse at it and as usual realized that I need to go back to that daily regimen of running, kick-boxing, wrestling, mountain biking, squats and sit-ups in conjunction with liquid diet, boiled vegetables, vitamins and protein supplements. I thought. And then I wished she was held up by some terrorists in some tower near Angkor Wat so that I can get a chance to rescue her. bloody not feasible.

Hmmm, now what ? Obviously I couldn’t expose all those grains of corn which I call teeth.Too bad. I never had any experience at this kinda stuff. I realized that until then, I was only good at picking noses. (my nose that is). I couldnt even touch the tip of my nose with my tongue. Try that. There must be something I could do that can impress her. Women claim that "sense of humour" is the number one in their list. But then, as you all can see, the jokes I crack are rarely funny and moreover they are so damn long that I would need fifty such encounters to get through with one. So cracking a joke out of the blue was out of question. If the idea was to make her laugh, making funny faces and looking really ridiculous could have been a way out. But if that was the case, she would have already been rolling on the floor and laughing by then. Other ideas did come to my mind but lets leave it at that. No light at the end of the damn tunnel.

And then before I realized, the door opened in front of us and the long tiring journey came to an abrupt, unconsummate end. And the fairy tale ended before it began.

* - Let me know if you are interested. I'll perform it live when we meet next.