A Thank You message

Well… this is just to be grateful to everybody who has made a difference in my life. All the people who I am connected to and share lovely memories with, all the people I admire. So here is the list.
First of all, I truly thank my family for always being there. They have always been a massive support and reason for whatever I am now. I might have not realised it earlier but lately I realised that they are the only thing I talk about. 24hours a day, I keep on talking about what my family is, what I used to do with my family and what all they have done for me. It is like whenever you hear me talking, be sure to hear atleast one of the words- family, sisters, mom, dad. They mean a lot to me, more than anything in this world. I am truly grateful to everybody. I don’t know how I can even tell them how much they mean to me. (tears)
Next, I want to thank my friends for giving me so many wonderful memories and being there with me in the best time of my life. The list is quite long. First of all, friends of my colony, Sonu didi, Usha didi, Manisha didi, Rinku bhaiya and Bobby bhaiya for introducing me to strange games I hadn’t known before. Simran for always being there for all the thrills and Ruhi for always giving me a patient ear whenever I wanted to pour my heart. Lovy for putting some seriousness even while playing and for some wonderful time we spent while cycling, playing carom and chess. Anisha, Yashi, Rajat, Krati, Prachi and many others for letting me lead you and truly making me feel like a leader. Thank you all for actually agreeing to whatever I said. I don’t know why you all did that. And yes, Ritika for her special appearances in summer times.
Next, my bus friends. First of all Rajeshwari for always being the friend for sharing secrets and the only one who will lightly yet seriously discuss about career and our future. Strangely I want to thank Renuka also for all the weird things and talks linked with her. It might not have been nice, but was still a different experience. Others include Shardul, who was one of the smartest and naughtiest person I have ever met, Abhinav, who was irritating yet someone whose absence was felt deeply, Gunjan, Prakhar and all the little loud kids of the last seat gang for giving me the name “radio mirchi”, for making my time in bus a real mayhem(hell) for counting each day how many times I turned back and every other thing. More people to name here are Aditya Bhaiya, Archit Bhaiya, Neha-Sneha, Nandini, Aashish, Graphy, Aastha, Amrit and blah blah. And yes, Siddharth for all the embarrassing moments when we fought. Those fights are truly memorable and worth telling.
Umm.. School… not many to list here. Still… dating to the earliest of my friends sukanya, chirag, rahul(if at all they were friends-chirag and rahul) and deepti. Shikha and aditi for being one of my first closest friends. Megha, Priyal, Aakanksha for being there (though for a small period.) Hehe.. Dhruv for all the excitement( ok, I am publicly admitting that he was my first crush, cough) Niyati for all the similarities and Apoorva for all the differences( no offence Apoorva, those differences are the reason for the strong friendship between us). And last but not the least, some friends I made almost when the school got over. Those include Uday( even though I knew and my family admired him since KG1) Abhishek, Gunjan, Shashank, Laveena and Manali. I think I cant add anymore names from school to whom I was really close.
Tuition. I have to split it in two parts. First is my first tuition class. Ahh… that has to be my best best best time till now. Thanks to everybody for making it so memorable. Cheers to Brainfiesta and all the fun we had together. Thanks everybody- Sanjana, Mayank, Pranjali, Divya, Ruhi-Megha(who joined because of me), Aditya, Arpit, Ankit, SIDDHARTH(Hehehe), Nikita, Rohit(I still cant forget how hard we used to slap each other for the silly game-gaalchat), Arpita(I think that was her name, I remember her surname well-shrivastava), chavvi(for her idiotness) and mona, mayuri, shahrukh, amrita(for being indifferent) and also sejal maám, menal madam, devesh sir and all our teachers.
Next in the later tuition, Heena, Sonal, Vairali, Deval are some I really want to name. rest didn’t make much of a difference to me. And specially Vaibhav- he is one of my truest friends. Thanks a lot.
Apart from all of them some others I really want to name here.
First of all DASHORA FAMILY. My god! They really are very special to me. Thank you aunty, for all the lovely achars. Thanks shrikant mahima and shashwat for laughing endlessly with me at silliest of jokes.
REVATHI MADAM: she is someone, I respect the most. She is truly amazing. All the praises in the world will be short to describe her. So knowledgible, so helping and yet so simple. Filled with infinite purity. Thanks a lot madam. Thanks for all the shlokas you taught me and all the morals I have learnt from you.
SHRUTI-SMRITI: I share many childhood memories with these two specially smriti. Smriti was always my favourite cousin. Also everybody from my mom´s family: mama mami and all the perimas and chittis and all my cousins. Lately I have spent a lot o time with Thangam Perimma and she has truly been very nice and sweet to me.

And thanks a lot to the latest generation of my family. All the little kids. Adarsh, Priya, nikhil and Neeti. You all are soooo cute, adorable and charming. Specially Nisha because I have spent so much time with her. She truly fascinates me with all her innovative ideas and charming pleasant energy!!!!!! Love you all, little geniuses.
And finally I want to list those I am connected to recently. All those here in Germany with me. First of all, three of my classmates, Naim, Aparna and Vikarn. Then our teacher, Neeta Maám and special thanks to my lovely German family-the Klemperts for helping a stranger from a different land! They have truly been lovely and kind to me! They never made me feel like an outsider in this country and made my stay so comfortable. Thanks a lot.

And lastly, thanks a lot to all the readers who took all the efforts to read this silly post!

the cattle family!!!!!!!

Some cute snippets, which I realised today, were a little connected to each other. The first story is about me being called “gaay” because of my name being Gayatri. The oldest memory I can recall of me having this name would be when my mami would call me Gaay 1, gaay 2, gaay 3! Since then, I think everybody started calling me “gaay” and I never felt uncomfortable with the name. Even in my tuition my friends used to call me “gaay” and tease me about eating grass and hay. It was one of the most common pet names for me in my family too. Everybody used to call me gaay even in public places without realising how awkward that would make me. It was one such moment I am going to share now. Once I had gone to the market with my sister to buy vegetables during monsoons. As a rule, every Indian vehicle stops working properly at such times. So after buying the vegetables, we tried hard to start our TVS scooty, which was very stubborn to switch on. When we had lost all our hopes for it to get going, it finally gave in with a little cough. In all the excitement to see the scooty finally on, my sister hurried to the driver’s seat and thought I would do the same and sit as quickly as possible. Unfortunately I was not quick enough, and before I could climb into the bike, she speeded away thinking I was already comfortably seated behind her. So there I was, like a dumb little girl in middle of a crowded market, not knowing what to do. At that age, I never used to take money with me and it never stuck me that you can get the money from the house to pay the auto-wala when you reach home. So I thought of walking back home, which was far away. This is half the story. My sister for a long time was unaware that I was not sitting behind her while she was driving merrily. The reason she didn’t realise that I wasn’t there was maybe because lately I had stopped holding my sister tight while she drove, boasting off that I was big enough to balance myself without having to hold her. She even tried talking to me on the way (as we usually did, we also used to sing a lot) but thought I might have been angry on her for some reason, which I often used to be for silly reasons. Hmm… so it was quite late (she had almost reached home) when she realised that I was not with her. And she got very tensed. And here is why I narrated such a long story (you might be wondering how it is related to me being called gaay). As she frantically looked for me everywhere, she started calling my name loudly. And as smart people can guess, she didn’t call out gayatri but “gaay” in the crowded street. At first she felt weird by the glaring stares of the people only to realise much later that it was because to people it seemed she was looking for cows in the market and searching for cows just by calling them was outlandish. Embarrassed by the unwanted attention, she started calling gayatri instead of Gaay. The rest of the story is not worth mentioning. To brief it up, she finally found me and we happily went back home. So this is my story of being called “gaay”.
Interestingly, my elder sister, with no connection to me being called `gaay` is called “saandh”(bull). The whole story for the name can be read in my sister’s blog. In short, she once slept a lot in a train and as a result failed to get down at the desired station and reached the last station instead. And when she finally reached home, taking another train from there, she slept for another 10 hours or so, only to be baptized by my sister as saandh (because she sleeps like a saandh). Hmm… so there is another connected story I recalled today. Once it was she who was coming to drop me off to my bus stand early on a chilly day of Indian winters. To protect myself from the cold I had worn, in accordance to my school uniform, two maroon sweaters, a maroon scarf, maroon gloves and was carrying a red water-bottle. At the entrance of our colony gate, we saw a cow coming towards us. As soon as my sister saw the cow, she warned me that it might be a bull and bulls get attracted to RED COLOUR. And since I was wearing everything maroon, I should better be careful. It was exactly at that time that the cow shook its head aggressively and moved ahead, shaking its forelegs forcefully. My sister seeing this screamed with all her might for me to run as fast as possible. I obeyed instantly (maybe for the first time) and ran with all the power I could gather, throwing my sweater and scarf on the way and shouting ‘bachao, bachao` much to the interest of people around. All the “uncle’s and auntie’s” of our colony asked me with great concern whether I had seen a snake (spotting a snake in our colony which is full of trees is quite common). And my reply in all the nervousness was “nahi, nahi, SAAAAAAAAANDH!!!”. I went back home drenched in sweat (in extreme winters) and told my mom the story. My mom listened to it patiently and asked me to go back to the bus-stop. The “saandh” would have probably gone by now. With much reluctance I went back to my bus-stop, looking everywhere for the saandh and ready to make a run again. And yes, I also had to wear my sweaters and scarf back which I had thrown away in all the panic. The bus was made to stop there for me for almost 15minutes and when I got inside everybody was curios to know the story. Well, I was smart enough not to make a fool of myself and only selected few were lucky enough to get to hear the story from me.
P.S. by the way it turned out that it was not saandh at all but only a cow. It had stirred its head violently because there were many mosquitoes around and had moved its legs fiercely (as we had thought) because it was crossing a line of pipes at the entrance of the colony!

Brainsmiths- Mind formation not mindless information!

Today was one of my closest friend’s birthday, Sanjana. The interesting part is that I talked to her exactly after a year. The last conversation we had was on her previous birthday. And we gradually lost touch while she helplessly made efforts to get my contact number. But it never felt as if we hadn’t talked all this long. There were no barriers due to distance and we talked for more than an hour!

It felt so good to talk to her after all this time and suddenly all the memories of her flushed back into my memory. We became friends when I joined Brainsmiths Coaching classes in 10^th and we were tuition-mates. Earlier we weren’t very close to each other, but unexpectedly became so close that I would spend most of my time at her house. She loved watching movies and even though I am not much of a movie-freak we had seen every single movie released at that time, even lame movies like Rakht or Socha na tha or that Diya Mirza+Emraan Hashmi movie with the song “mujhe tumse mohabbat hai. Not only her, everybody in Brainsmiths was good-natured and fun-loving. I had the best time of my life there. The best part was nobody was fake or artifitial in anyway and we had such innocent definitions of having fun. We used to eat junk food (noodles or samosas) all the time at simple cheap places and loved having ice-creams all the time. We would puncture each other’s cycles, play truth-and-dare all the time, tease each other and sometimes study together. We would go to temples and churches but would make a lot of noise that we would leave the place feeling embarrassed. We would sit for hours after the tuitions got over, simply chatting about every single topic we could think of. Even the teachers wouldn’t mind our mischiefs but still would lecture us all the time to get serious about life.Those day were so simple, sweet, lovely, unsophisticated with absolutely no worries. We failed in many attempts to go for morning walks, only to gather at Sanjana’s house and eat lovely breakfast and then decide to go for a movie. Even working in Sanjana’s kitchen was fun whenever her mom asked us to. It was there, I had learnt to make coffee while we used to study together. We would stir coffee powder and sugar for a long time before pouring milk on it.

“Brain-fiesta” our cultural programme that year was the best party I have ever been to. We had presented an excellent dance-number, had lovely dinner and danced till 10 (which for us was a big deal in 10^th) at the DJ party. It was at that DJ party that I had learnt crazy dance steps which I can never ever forget. I was also given the “most sincere student” award which seemed very funny to everybody because I was the naughtiest girl there. Sanjana had got the “best performance” award for which everybody said that maybe our titles had got exchanged because she was definitely very sincere in studies. It was Brainsmiths where I got my name “gaay” (cow) and I never even felt awkward whenever they called me that.

Me and Pranjali had named our group as “nutties” which initially included only girls. And the boys then made a group called “Aasma” taking initials of their names. Later these two groups merged into one lovely group which even after many years if meets will never be formal, never artifitial to one another and am sure will chatter for hours together.

Most of the time it was me, Sanjana, Pranjali, Amrit, Mayank and Siddharth who would hang out together but we were occasionally joined by Aishwarya(vatsa and Mishra), Aditya, Megha, Ruhi, Arpit, Rohit, Divya, Nikita, Apoorva and many others. I love all of them and simply treasure (like everybody else in our group) every single moment of brainsmiths. We had even made diaries for everybody where we had written funny things about everybody which would remind us of them later and make us smile. I still have a sudden gush of happiness whenever I look at the diaries. So many wonderful memories are stored in there.

MY FAMILY!!!!

This was supposed to be one of my earliest posts on my blog, but for no reason I kept delaying it. Anyways better late than never!:-)

This is about the most important thing in my life, which has shaped me for whatever I am now, My Family. With no exaggeration I can proudly say that this is the best family (slightly larger than others, hehe) in the world. I feel the luckiest person on earth to be a part of this “SVLUVG” family (to be read as ‘yes, we love jee/ G for Gayatri’). Now let me talk about every member of this great family individually.

In SVLUVG order, let me write about the lifeline of our family. S- Savithri that is my mom! How can I ever stop talking about her!?! I not only love her deeply but more than that respect and admire her for the woman she is. So strong, so talented, so enthusiastic about life, always level-headed, so humble, so inncocent and child-like yet very mature, she simply balances both her office and family amazingly. We can never even think handling anything without her. At her age (going to be 57, big age difference I know, but I have three elder sisters) she is more enthusiastic than all the teenagers alive. I can with no doubt say that if challenged to race with any teenager; my atheletic mom would be the one who will win!! She is always full of energy, ask her to participate even in something she might not have even heard about, she would participate heartily, put all her energy to it and practice continuously till she perfects it. I remember the yearly hindi-divas in her office, where she would participate in everything right from hindi-poetry recitation to hindi-song competitions despite her poor hindi. And then will recite her poems (my hindi course book poems) or learn a song from somewhere and sing it, all through the day. And the days when she was transferred to Ujjain, she would daily travel for two hours and after coming back she would enthusiastically dance till 12 during navaratris and it would be me in the end who will force her to come home. Plus she is incredibly brilliant! You need not teach her anything at all, she will grasp everything before you know it. And yes, she loves boasting about it to my innocent pavam dad! Not to forget an unbeatable memory. She remembers every single date and phone-number that could be of any use!

She is the best mom in the world and never asks anything from us in return. Bad daughters as we are, we shout and yell at her all the time about the silliest of things. Still she would never shout back and on the other hand will simply fulfill our craziest of demands without complaining at all (though sharing her worries with Makhijani auntie can be excused, hehe). She is overloaded with worries and troubles in her life. As it is her office is so tiring, after that she sometimes has to run to the hospital at 2 in the night(my dad being a heart-patient), come to manipal to get me admitted to college and check whether everything is proper, go to my sister’s place for her delivery and then also make arrangements for my other sister’s marriage! We simply expect her to do everything for everybody! And when we go back home, we consider ourselves to be the queen’s of the world in large and order her around, expecting her to make delicious food for us (by the way, she is a wonderful cook) and plainly forgetting that she also has a hectic office-life.

Ohhk let me stop here or else even the entire space in internet will not be enough to write on. And I still have five more incredible people in my life to write about!!!

To continue with the next person in my SVLUVG is my daaaaaad. He is a proud “IITian” who loves talking high about his daughters to anybody who agrees to listen. He is simply sweeeet with his usual chant of “ongu amma ennu tithina” thousand times a day, his rigorous walks for more than three hours daily, his pain-staking sessions of free-cell everyday, his calls in every two hours, his latest craze for forwarded mails and high-tech mobiles and his high-pitched recital of the song “muthaitiru…”. He is lost in his own world making flailing attempts to get in synch with the world. He repeats the same jokes everytime and surprisingly laughs as hard as he would have for the first time. He simply loves kids but connects to them strangely which often scares them away!

I remember the times when he was transferred to Bhopal and I would visit him during my summer vacations, he would daily buy me ice-creams from top-in-town and as many chocolates as I wanted.

If I know him well, the best thing that he would surely be pleased with, would be to relax with the cooler on and to have someone walking on his legs and massaging them {I could not think of a better word :-(}

He is the silent supporter of our family who subtly looks after everbody and provides us with everything we need. All these years he has never bought anything for himself but simply saved every single penny to fulfill our desires and to make our future secure! He is the best example of all the loving dads the banking and insurance companies advertise about!

Now comes my eldest sister Lakshmi or as I call her “lakshmikka”. She is a genius, unbeatable in everything. Anybody who knows her well can never stop praising her to glory! She has the mind of a computer and can easily top any exam without even putting efforts. She is also wonderful cook (I think that is in our blood. Everybody cooks so well, except me:-( )

She is the one who is most attached to the family. She would be genuinely concerned for everybody and looks into every detail, consider every aspect, pros and cons about every single thing related to us. She is a typical Cancerian and is a very loving mother! Even at the age of 15, she was the one who took care of me more than my mother. I have heard that whenever anybody would praise any other kid infront of her, she would become all possessive and say, “apni gayu koi kam thodi hai!” She is completely a family-person and would do anything for her family (who else would reject the calls from all IIMs to get married?!?!?) Plus she is so simple, never dresses up, no make-up at all and would walk everywhere in simple slippers.

To sum it up, I can say, she is the ideal daughter, ideal wife, ideal mother, ideal sister and ideal person as a whole. You can never relate her to anything that is wrong. People get distracted but she has incredible control over herself and can never do anything that is bad.

Hmm… let me proceed with my next sister, Vidya (vidikka). She was the one I spent most time with, in my childhood. As a kid, I used to call her cleanliness-freak which she is actually! But more than that, she has an amazing personality. She carries herself so well, always well-dressed with a cute-dimpled smile! She easily wins people’s trust and can talk amiably to any type of person.

She loves reading books (which she enculcated in me earlier) and has a brilliant vocabulary! When she was in Indore she made me talk to her only in English because of which I was very fluent at it. But as she shifted to a different place for her studies, I gradually lost touch with my command on English (sigh). She was the one who used to give me food everyday when I came tired from school and forcefully made me drink milk two times a day! She taught me almost all the shlokas I know today and I can never forget the days when we both would sing together on the vehicle while driving to any place. And it is only because of her that I am such a sleepy-head now. Earlier she would force me to sleep every afternoon when I was hyperactive. Now all the energy is gone off me and only the habit of sleeping has remained. I miss the lovely dal-makhani and cakes she used to make!!

Now only remains my youngest elder sister, Umakka better known in manipal as my angel-sister living in Bangalore mainly because she is my financial support here! She is cute, she is lively, she is child-like and at the same time she is responsible, hard-working, perfectionist and a bit moody too. As a kid, she used to waste all her time in front of the mirror, talking to herself. She only taught me to make soap-bubbles and identify the sound lizards make. She used to take me to my dance classes in her cycle three times a week (she would come directly from her school which was far-away and with the remaining energy dance in the class). And she loved telling us with intricate details the dreams she saw daily. She was the only one in our family who would study hard in school and college, because of which she has owned herself a brilliant academic record too! She loves shopping, but not for herself, for me! She is very calm and balanced and hardly loses temper. She listens to every silly thing you have to say patiently. Tell her all your problems and she will always be there to help you out. And she loves doing the creative stuff, all kinds of paintings and knitting. When we used to go to Bhopal for our vacations she would make me walk all the way down to New-Market and buy all the material required for different kinds of paintings (emboss, sand, jardosi) and soft toys. And one significant thing about her is that in every phtograph of hers she looks totally different. One would find it hard to believe it’s the same person in all the photos. But all her photos are so interesting. Always a new expression in every photo with an exciting adventure to back it up!

In all I can say, with everybody showering their love and affection on me I consider myself very lucky to have such a great family. Love you all! Thanks for always being there.

P.S. I forgot to mention that Umakka has a funny habit of talking in her sleep!

my best-friend, Simran...

SIMRAN… what can I tell about her. There is so much to write about, so many fond memories I have shared with her. I just simply cannot stop myself from writing about her.
It has been 10years since I know her and she has always been there with me in sharing my enthusiasm for weird stuff. Stuff many people fancy but nobody dares to put into action. Yes, we have done things people might not even dream about.
When I think of Simran, what comes immediately into my mind is playing in sand and stones, trying to catch each other on cycles at high speed, skipping ropes till midnight, dancing in rains and jumping in dirty puddles, analyzing lizards, writing “dusht-papi” on every dusty window pane of cars we can find, walking barefoot, going to ATMs and taking out blank chits from there, watching Timon and pumba and imagining our friends in place of the cartoon characters, sitting on top of our colony’s water-tank, sitting on the other side of the narrow railing of my balcony (which was on the first floor), going for morning walks {which can hardly be called morning walks because all we used to do is stroll around agricultural colony, pluck wild flowers, eat “Bandar ki roti” (or “ratanjoth” as Lovy might call it!), look at the sunrise, talk to strangers and on our way back collect dates from the “khajur ka ped”} and most importantly playing BHOOT-BHOOT!
We used to talk to all kinds of animals as if they were really able to understand us. Once we were speaking to a chameleon we had spotted in a park and then suddenly it reacted as if it had understood what we were saying, making us laugh almost for an hour! We together had also invented several games, which are quite popular in our colony now. We had invented a very complicated song game which many have still not properly understood, the Scooby-doo game and a game even for playing badminton! And we never used to simply skate. We would make stories while skating about two girls competing for a skating event and many complicated stories would follow. We would also make funny stories with occasional mention to aliens! We had even named one of the trees we used to climb often as “mausi ped”. REASON: one day we had climbed on one of the trees as a usual routine and were playing household or more precisely “ghar-ghar”, when suddenly Simran thought that we should not be climbing trees as it might hurt them. And since I loved climbing trees I was giving her reasons why we should not stop doing so. First I said that it might not hurt them because they do not have nerves and it is the nervous system that “feels”. Still she wasn’t convinced so I came up with a new theory. I told her that we sit on our mother’s lap all the time. It never hurts her because she loves us so much to bear the pain. In a similar way, these trees are also like our moms, Mausi and they would not mind us sitting on them. She was convinced with my answer and from that day onwards not only us but almost everybody started calling that tree as Mausi Ped!
And once during navaratri, we both had got oranges from a house we had gone for Kanyabhojan. On our way back, I had finished half of my orange while she hadn’t even peeled hers. At that time I asked her to compete with me in eating the orange first. She obviously did not agree with me, so I began lecturing her dreamily that we should take up impossible challenges and try our hardest to achieve them. Too engrossed in my dreamy thought I started singing the lines from some song, “who sikandar hi kehlata hai, haari baazi ko jeetana jise aata hai” when I suddenly realized that Simran was not commenting at all. It was then I glanced at her to see her mouth full with orange! I realized (a bit late) that I was too busy singing to notice that she had finished the orange before me while I was still holding my half-eaten orange. She smirked at me and still teases me for my foolishness.
I have also shared one of my most embarrassing moments with her or more correctly because of her! We were once playing boogie-woogie in our colony where we were giving our special performance when I turned towards her; she held me with one hand and let me go. I spanned myself away from her and when I glanced at the audience, everyone was laughing their hearts out. Both of us were nonplussed by their amusement. Then I suddenly realized that I was no-more wearing the skirt I had worn. We both were unaware that when I swirled myself away from her, she by mistake had held my skirt so tight that it came off me. We both were so embarrassed and she quickly threw my skirt at me and I wore it as quickly as I could have. This was surely my worst “boogie-woogie” performance ever! To beat that, she has made me fall from swings very badly many times and is even responsible for me to get almost drowned! We had joined swimming classes nearby and on our first day playfully were pretending to drown at shallow waters. At that moment she told me to do the same thing a little deeper and I agreed. She went deeper inside without realizing the deepness and suddenly slipped deeper because of the slanted floor and actually started drowning. I had already learnt swimming previous year, so considering myself to be an expert I went to her as a lifeguard. And when I reached her, she clung to me so tightly that I was hardly able to move. In between the intervals, when I managed to get myself above the water, I tried explaining her to let me go so that I could at least try to save us but the moment was very panicky for explanation. In the end, she forcefully made me sit on the floor on my knees and jumped on my back to ask for help. Unfortunately people still thought we were pretending to drown and nobody came for rescue. When I was about to exhaust, a little girl luckily came there with an air-tube and Simran immediately held her tube and managed to tell her about our condition in between her the deep breaths. And the next moment, she looked down to search me but by then I was able to rise myself up since I was free from simran’s tight clench on me. Since then, we never dared to even pretend drowning!
Another moment which I would like to mention in this post would be of the day we sang in an orchestra. Once when an orchestra had come to perform in our colony, I suddenly thought of asking them to let us sing too. At first, Simran was a little hesitant about it so I went there alone and told them that I wanted to sing. They readily let me sing and I sang “ajeeb dastan hai yeh”. After seeing me sing, Simran really wanted to sing too. She asked me whether I would sing along with her and I agreed. So we went there and again told them to let us sing. We had decided to sing “mann sath samundar dol gaya” and that Simran would begin the song and sing till the first paragraph and I would continue from there. So she began singing and to her dismay, instead of playing the tune of that song they started playing “kajra re” in the background which messed up the whole song. She still struggled hard to sing the song in rhythm but failed and I was there at the stage giggling at the funny situation. I didn’t find it pretty hard to sing the next paragraph because by the time my chance came, I had prepared myself to sing the song in other tune. But Simran was very disappointed. But in the end, we both agree to one thing. What matters is the memory. At least she can cherish the fact that she got the opportunity to sing in an orchestra!
I also love to remember the silly fights we used to have! We have fought for the skin of a jack fruit (to put it in our shoes, to get the acupressure feeling), and at times when we both got extra-competitive in Scooby-doo games or when we choreographed dances for navratri or the times when she would get jealous (extremely jealous) whenever I paid more attention to other people than her. The funny part about this is she used to get jealous even when I used to talk to her school friends who I hardly know! Anyways, Simran has always been one of my truest friends and I really miss being with her I miss the times when we would sit in our colony garden and start talking philosophy, going to her house and simply sit there in her kitchen while she made khichdi for me, riding vacant tthelas and the time when I used to teach her for her 10th boards!

What's in a name?!?!

How do your loved ones call you? Me? I have hundred billions of names with which I am called. Gullu, Gutchu, Kutchu, Chunnu, Chuntu, Gayu, Gaya, Gaay, Lala, Chucki, Tabe, Chakdu, Rotli, Cindrella (because I suffered constantly coz of my wicked sisters) and many more. There are so many different names with which I am called that if you hear any weird sound in our house, it might be one of my names!
But the most interesting of all is a name worth a tale. Apart from the names I mentioned earlier, I am also called as “PUNGI”. Weird, right? Why would anyone call anybody with such a strange name? How did they manage to come up with such an odd name? You would get all the answers if you read on.
There used to be a boy, with oil dripping from every strand of his hair, who lived near our house. He would daily come to my house and ask for my flute in the most irritating tone ever, saying “Gayatri, Pungi dena.” Then he would play the flute in absurd ways with noise screeching right through my ears. It used to annoy me to the core. After tolerating him for a while, I started avoiding him or told him straight on his face that I would not give him my flute, come what may! He would immediately start wailing at the top of his voice, repeating a same line over and over again; “Gayatri mujhe pungi nahi de rahi” till my sisters would force me to give him the flute. Obviously his wails would bug my sisters equally.
Meanwhile, I used to cry a lot, drained by my sisters’ constant vigil over me. And my cries would remind them of the flute-guy who would cry in the same way for the dearest PUNGI. So thus came the name PUNGI, and they started calling me that name ever since, teasing me that cries were similar to the harsh sound of pungi/flute. To make things worse, I would prove myself worthy for that name by crying louder still.
The only ray of hope used to be my mom, who would come running all the way, to comfort me and would say that I am not at all a pungi, but rather a HASMUKH, who smiles all the time.
And hence comes another name, HASMUKH, in the never-ending list of the names I am called by!