Weekend Chronicles

This was a fun weekend, involving everything that I would like to do/experience (at least on the weekends) for the rest of my life - Sooper company, good conversations, interesting movies, music, some travel and awesome food. Probably the only thing that was missing was cricket!

It was a Dinner and a Movie night on Friday. M reccommended that we hit this Mexican joint close to the U Del campus, after which we caught the first show of the big screen adaption of the Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I cannot say much about the movie. I wanna see the movie again, mainly because a lot of Alan Rickman's lines went unheard, in lieu of the poor quality of the sound system! However I think the movie remains true to the book, inspite of Adam's death midway through the screenplay writing.

M and I then spent almost the rest of the night talking about a lot of things over coffee, ice cream and cookies till the juggernaut otherwise known as sleep ran us over in the wee hours of the morning when the birds were just taking their first chirps. Nice start to the weekend. Coincidentally, every single Friday night (4 so far) here, I have never managed to sleep before 3 am, in spite of promising myself a early retirement to bed. However, its mostly been fun, if you discount that India Pakistan ODI last month.

Woke up Saturday morning and made a quick trip back home to re-brush my teeth, get a change of clothes. After a heavy lunch at an Indian restaurant, we decided to do a bit of sightseeing, in spite of the steady drizzle. During a brief lull in the rain, we hit the Longwood Gardens (the erstwhile residence of the heirs to the DuPont empire) about a hour before the scheduled closure at 6 pm and learnt a bit about fragrant flora and their scientific names. We also seemed to discover that "digitalis" refers to "digit like" or "finger like", though that was a surmise from one of the guys in the group. Took a couple of nice pics that I thought brought my softer side out into the open. Haven't seen them yet. On the road again in pouring rain, we decided to make a detour to the local Indian store to pick up some chaat supplies. One of the gals picked up a couple of DVDs with Assorted Bollywood hits (one specificially mentioning RDB), which seems to be the terminology used to refer to any DVD that contains all the songs from 4 or 5 different movies. Over Bhelpuri and Panipuri, we shot our way through these two DVDs till we came to an interesting song - Mere Sapnon Ki Raani (Aradhana).

Through my time at college and at several different points since then, I have been involved in arguments surrounding the title of the book that Sharmila Tagore (OMG, she really pouts her way through scenes!) seems to be reading on the train while she furitively glances at Rajesh Khanna serenading her from his jeep. While the author of this book has been universally narrowed down to Alistair Mclean, the book's title has always been in conjecture, with several being touted as the one. Ladies and Gentleman, I can safely settle this argument once in for all and will probably post a DVD screen shot sometime in the near future! The title of the book is When Eight Bells Toll! Thank you! (* takes a bow as he prepares for entry into the Quizzing Hall of Fame for valuable contributions such as these to the quizzing fraternity !)

A craving for ice cream made us venture back out into the drizzle to the nearest Dunkin Donuts / Baskin Robbins outlest where I gorged on a twin scoop of fruity sherbet and pista ice-cream with roasted almonds topped by a cherry. A longer drive followed (don't ask me why, but I guess the answer would be, because we could!) and we came back close to midnight and plonked ourselves down on the carpet to watch the digitally recreated version Mughal-E-Azam (in color). I thought the movie was actually hilarious with the romantic looks and the lines getting laughs out of the RC me! I was not too impressed with the "remastering", but again I don't know how the result compares with other efforts such as the old Three Stooges movie that I read about somewhere a couple of months ago.

Soon the sight of the majority catching a few winks on the side provoked the host into ordering us into our respective beds. We did retire to bed soon after, but sleep we did not. All of us ended up talking for close to another hour and I finally hit dreamland around 3 am.

But it has been a quiet Sunday so far, after I got back home close to noon. I caught up with the dirty laundry (literally) and got some reading done in advance for the coming week.

I know this is turning out to be a diary that I never intended to have, but I think I haven't had this much fun in the last months. The week is actually very hectic with the amount of reading and training that I have been doing on the professional front and thankfully the weekends have been just the medicine to rest the otherwise tired mind. I think it helps to have a few like minded friends around! Thanks guys!

Thanks to all those who left comments on my previous post. I think it was just a morose 24 hours that prompted that outburst. And as for all of you who have been leaving comments on my twin Gaana posts, thank you too. I think these two posts have been the ones with the maximum comments so far on this blog. I appreciate your interest and your comments and hope you will be back!