When the Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...

Kansas Mallya

The boring routine of everyday evening was further compounded when the usual "humorless" suspects of the group caught up at my place. We were languishing around, and were laughing at our wisecracks, as our low level humor was hitting rock bottom. Some of the jokes (if I may call that way) did not deserve a second hearing, but there was no stopping us.

We were watching Godavari, the romantic Telugu movie. If Emani was with us, he would have been proud of us. He would have also tried to impress us with his trivia about Telugu cinema. Not that we cared about all that, but as I said, anybody in the group can talk, whether anybody else wanted to listen or not. It was always one way traffic. When somebody talks, not that the other person would talk, it is just that there would be nobody else to listen. All said and done, the movie was good, and I like Kamalini Mukherji, and thanks to Dhake, I realized that the other girl in the movie was Neetu Chandra (Man! I really liked her; I mean, we really liked her).

So, it is not hard to figure out what the next step of action would be. Mysore wanted to share his knowledge of some great pictures of Neetu Chandra that he had seen on the internet. That's not pretty hard to find considering how much we spend our time browsing. There, by the side, on another laptop, Kansas (KC) Mallya was enjoying watching Katrina Kaif on youtube. So, this was the scenario at home. There was a movie on TV, two of them were occupied with Neetu Chandra and the other guy was busy with Katrina Kaif. I was taking advantage of the situation by having my eyes on everything at once. It was a full-filling moment. It is another hilarious story as to how the name Kansas Mallya was bestowed on the most influential Indian character in Kansas. I have to share this. The sequence is pretty awesome.

Yadu was watching Katrina Kaif on youtube, when one of them commented, "Man, she made a mess of the closing ceremony in IPL." So, I said, "So what guys, she is in the good books of Mallya." Mysore, who thinks he can talk seriously, said "So, you mean Yadu is Mallya?" Dhake screamed from behind, "Yadu is Kansas (KC) Mallya." There was a loud guffaw. I don't think we have arrived at such good mathematical derivations, even, in school. If we had used even 10 per cent of our miscellaneous skills, we would have been somewhere else now!!!!

Setting all that aside, next day at work, I had not taken anything for lunch. So, I thought I'll make do with some salad. I happily stuffed my plate with all possible vegetables, and went to the counter. She weighed the salad, and casually said 12$. What! I said, but had enough sense to hide my disappointment quietly. OK! I said, and I paid without a word. I came back and told my colleagues. All of them let out a big laughter. I knew I had eaten the most expensive salad at work.

Comments

  1. nice nickname...and $12 for a salad..what are u? a cow?

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  2. Seriously...12$...I might have been mistaken for some bovine creature :-)

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  3. yeah...stick to sandwiches..you will get a nice one for $5 :P

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  4. $12 !! Gosh ! Probably you should start eating meat ;-)

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