A Bachelor Among Bachelors

It had been some time since I had seen Sanal, a good friend and former colleague. So when he called me up for lunch yesterday, I went to see him as quickly as possible (even forgetting to shave the weekend stubble I had given myself).

While we had our lunch at the nearby Mantra restaurant, we started talking and did what we were best at: he barely letting a few words out and me trying to get those rare sentences out of his mouth by verbally poking and prodding him. But the best I could do was to make him mutter something or the other (he must have been cursing me :-).

After getting our tummies filled up, we met Ajai , my relationship with him being the same thing I shared with Sanal. It seemed that Ajai has been bolstering up his wardrobe and jabbing at his newly acquired sony ericson mobile for quite some time (other than coding in C#/.NET). Atleast, thats all he had to show for the trouble I had taken to see him :-D. We then bade goodbye to Ajai.

Fast forward a highly uneventful bus-ride to where we got to Sanal's spacious bachelor pad near silk board. And meet his room mate Nigel, a mallu like us. Four of their roomies had taken advantage of the republic day holiday offer to be off to their native and so we had the whole place to ourselves.

We proceeded to start the show by watching The Usual Suspects. Its movies like these which you need to be reminded of. As usual, Kevin Spacey showed us what acting was all about. By evening, we had made ourselves hungry and Chef Sanal deemed that it was time for him to cook somethin' up. He poured in the wheat flour and water to make some dosas but that turned out to be more water than the powder. So we experimented with adding in some rava (which is used to make a local delicacy called upma). Surprisingly, the resulting "thing" did turn out to be digestable.

While Nigel went out to do some net browsing, courtesy of canceling a friend's bus or train ticket, Sanal and I took to the balcony and got ourselves a conversation going on hot topics like marriage, career-moves, finance and the ever-mysterious phenomenon called girls. All the while, we acted as if we were staring at a construction site where the laborers were concreting one of the floors and not look at a pair of lovers getting cosy right below us.

After a round of whiskey, which I took in order to prove to myself that I could control the liquid running round my head (and which I succeeded in by staying sane and song-free after three pegs of the strong stuff), we had chappatis and eggs to bury the drink in. Sanal insisted demurely that he remain alcohol free and so Nigel and I was forced to not let the stuff go waste.

Since we didn't have any other way to end the Sunday properly, we helped ourselves to another round of movie time with As Good as It Gets. An apt way of saying how we spend the day... in a way.