( The following post has been jointly written by me and Apaar, since several fundaes were involved it obviously required two writers to recall all of them )
It was nearing midnight. Eleven people lined up in one of the most happening streets of Goa in front of one of most well known pubs, all grinning, all conscious of their
mien, all confused. It was a proper ironical ending to an already comical day. The click of the camera and the flash of light seemed to last an eternity. Many people around us stopped in their tracks, some of them urged us to give a bigger smile, others were just stunned by our mere fatuity. The pic in more ways than one summed up our day. The pic was nowhere on the cards, it was totally uncalled for but still no one protested when one of us came up with the idea. Everyone had their own reasons.
Many might think of it as a consolation, others might say that it was a final nail in the coffin but for me it was irony immortalized. To make any sense to anyone apart from those who were a part of this fiasco, lets rewind the clock back a few hours.
It was our second day in Goa. It was a day when our plans were being made a subject of mockery. It was a day like none other. To begin with we woke up to find ourselves fooled with the news that instead of avengers for our bike trips to the beaches we would have to be getting a splendor, an old fazer and an activa. The mayhem had begun. The fifteen kilometer ride to the beach was filled with more drama. Dry bikes, flying helmets and dribbling volleyball on the road were just the starters.
The insanity reached its pinnacle when I dropped my Rs 14000 cellphone
on the highway without realising it. The other guys were at quite a distance
from me and yasser to notice anything falling off. How we got the cellphone back
is unbelievebly more shocking. Aneesh noticed a guy picking up a cell phone from the ground and managed to just get a peek of the phone. It looked pretty similar to him the model that I owned. Making a wild guess he stopped and shouted to everyone that I
have dropped my cellphone and that a guy has taken it. What happened next was fairly straightforward. We got back the phone and carried on.
With all our bits and pieces in place we finally reached the Bagah beach by noon. The next 3-4 hours proved to be the epicentre of all the drama that was yet to follow. With the Goan air slowly but surely sinking deep into our souls we became more tempted and longed for more entertainment. And thus began our 8 hour regime that all of us present there would never forget( one can get a clue of how impacting the whole saga was, from the fact that it prompted even lara to say that he would never forget it). While we were playing, we found it difficult to concentrate on the games as we caught hold of these five beautiful girls, all in their beach wear, roaming around the beach. These girls were the center of attraction on the beach with all the men and boys being distracted by these girls. We also gazed at them and admired their beauty like the rest of the people on the beach. But there was a twist in the tale, me and Aneesh decided that we wanted to go Parasailing and we sat in the boat and what d o we see in the boat four of those girls sitting there and talking. We could not believe our luck that we would be spending the next hour with these girls, just the two of us and these four girls. But, we being from VNIT College, talking to girls is a sin, so we didn’t speak a single word but just stared at them. They even tried to start a conversation, but we stuck to our VNIT credentials and didn’t continue it. So we were back from our rather silent but interesting nonetheless parasailing experience and we told everyone about it. That increased the frustration levels from our group, and I don’t remember whose idea was it but we were seriously thinking of asking these girls out (Its true, no matter how bizarre it may sound, but it’s true.)
With a little bit of persuation everyone talked Akhil into asking a group of girls at the beach to join us at dinner at Tito's(its one of the most famous disc in Goa). He agreed. We got our first opportunity shortly but failed to capitalize on it as no one dared to take the initiative. With time running out, we began to feel it was out of bounds for anyone of us to muster the courage to talk to the strangers. Then we got another chance but again were left begging. We started to make mockery of ourselves for even dreaming of having dinner with a group of unknown girls at a pub. Suddenly out of nowhere Akhil went back and followed the group of girls accompanied by none other than Lara and me. The other four guys cheered us on without any effort
of hiding their sarcasm. Soon i was unable to conjure any more audacity and retreated. It was Akhil and Lara that finally intercepted the girls on their way. Akhil, with confidence oozing from every inch talked the matter through
and managed to get their phone numbers. Lara in the meantime did what he always
does, went up to the girls and stared at them, watching them talk to Akhil.
Here, I must just spare time to praise the courage Akhil showed, he ran half a kilometer behind these absoultely unknown girls and asked them out just like that. Kudos to Akhil for that.
Back to the story, the final outcome of the short meeting was that the girls
would consider our proposal and would call us back in an hour. In the meantime
we had our lunch, all confident of a negative reply from them. On our way to another beach, they called. Their reply was affirmative.
We all stood there at the Anjuna beach,STUNNED by our own courage, bedazzled by our luck, intrigued by what was in store. Beach...What beach?....Forget the beach...
Innumerable plans were brooding in everyone's mind...although it must be said that some of us were still apprehensive of them turning up in the night. Our stay at the Anjuna beach was stunted to a large extent. Time was running out. We had to make the choice of going to the pub directly i.e. dressed in casuals, bathed in sand or to go back 15km and 'change'.
Our apprehensiveness fueled the former option but i guess we were lucky that we stuck with the latter. It was a choice that made the day unforgettable. Our journey back to our house was relatively serene keeping in mind what we had already gone through and what was in store. We reached our place with only 45 odd minutes remaining before we needed to start our engines again if we had to reach the disc on time.
It was utter chaos. Pandemonium reigned.
The following is an actual set of events that happened in our apartment:
As soon as we reached the apartment, there was utter chaos. There were people running here and there, to the bathroom, to the toilet and then again back to the bathroom.
Akhil : abe shave karna chahiye...
Yasser: haa yaar...but there's no shaving cream left!!!
What followed was mind boggling. They were thinking of shaving using Pantene shampoo instead of shaving cream. Have you ever in your wildest dreams seen a bunch of guys shave there hair using Pantene shampoo, we almost did! But fortunately, they did not as Aneesh had bought shaving gel with him. We were left on our fours, almost choking with laughter, struggling to catch our breath when we came to know about this.
Yasser: Abe unko call lagake time pooch na.
Akhil: Ha poochta, pehle mereko brush karne de.
That guy brushed his teeth to talk with those girls on the phone!
With time running out fast some more innovations had to be implemented.
Some of the guys washed thier hair in the basin because the bathroom was occupied by someone else. Some even started speaking in English with other guys. Akhil was thinking whether he should wear his goggles at 10 in the night. He spent nearly 10mins in aligning his sweat shirt in perfect symmetry. Lara was confused for about 10-15 min on whether to should pull up his collar or not. Finally, with all the final touches completed, we embarked on our journey just about on time. We reached there only to find that the girls had not yet arrived. Frantic calls were made.
They said they would reach in 10 min. The wait was agonising in its own harsh way. We weren't able to concentrate on any other substance, too perturbed, too edgy. Empty stomach wasn't helping our cause either.
Finally, they arrived. With butterflies in our stomach, we went up to them, still
not quite able to fathom the fact that they did come. Our worst fear was over. However, things did not go as we had planned. The rates of the disc turned out to be
hysterically higher than what we had been told earlier. For the nth time that day we were all stunned to silence, struck dumb, totally at a loss of words. What was more peeving was that the girls were allowed free entry. We tried to see if we could shift our venue to some other place but unfortunately that was not to be. Having a free entry to such an electrifying pub was something the girls were not able to put down.
It might have something to do with the weather that day
because our fundaes just kept increasing. Finally as a parting funda, we asked those girls to click a photo with us and they obliged. The picture described at the start of post finally brought the curtains down on the entire saga. The best description of the entire fiasco was given by Bade, when he said after clicking the picture “ Ab main kiskiko muh dikhane ke layak nahi laya “, and then wore the helmet that was in his hand.
It was a proper ironical ending to an utterly comical day.
It was in the end as Yasser said, A Perfect VNIT Ending (khaya piya kuch nahi bas photo nikal ke aa gaye!)
