With great power, comes great responsibility! ... seems like with no power also, you have great responsibility and the worst part of responsibility is that you are assumed to be doing your job when you do things right, but lo and behold, you slip up once in a while, and you are singled out for all the mistakes committed by your last three generations. Well, I guess that’s how life functions and no, we ain’t complaining because we get to crib about it till the early hours of the morning while watching “deadly” movies on a dysfunctional TV.
So this weekend was my flatmate’s birthday, and for the first time in my life I got to plan a whole birthday party which is no mean feat. While in campus, you had neither the money nor the opportunity to indulge or be creative. The standard thing was to gift a huge card with scribbled messages, cut the cake at midnight, make a collage of some snaps, torture the birthday boy/girl, go to Tamanna Café on D-Day, not eat anything and share a bhel and a sandwich between 13 people, and finally have one combined grand birthday treat some two months later when we have pooled in enough money. The lack of surprise element, the lack of variety and the lack of finance was made up by the sheer number of people who celebrated your growing old.
But this time, now that we have an apartment to ourselves, more freedom and a little more money, things were a little different. Being the only flatmate I had a lot of responsibility with no power; This wasn’t quite a cakewalk but the walk for the perfect cake was quite long. I mean, after I had narrowed down all the bakeries in Hiranandani, after I had spoken to all of them, and after I have zeroed in on a shop, it should have been an easy task to simply walk down to the store, take a quick look, select the cake and place an order. WRONG!! There I was, wondering around Galleria on a Saturday afternoon looking for the illusive BROWNIE POINT, asking random people and coming back to the same place I started as people kept directing me to this swanky salon called Brown n Brown which I can never afford. Finally after about an hour when I have had enough, I called up the shop again, this time asking for their exact location, and the morons had the nerve to tell me that they have closed down the shop at Galleria and shifted to JB Nagar and suggested that I should come down there! Yeah right, like I have no life. Ok, I don’t but they don’t know that. But think about this… you update your phone number on the net, but you don’t update your address!!! Who does that? So yes, I definitely didn’t buy anything from such a place and stuck to good old Monginis, trying to fit in a message from my roomie’s parents on a tiny cake. While the rest of it was smooth thanks to my precision and planning (I did study Operations Research in college, even though I almost flunked it). Cake done, gifts done, card done, decorations done, birthday messages collected from the entire CKB group over the phone, security guard taken into confidence! As we somehow managed to whisk the birthday girl to-be to a nearby pub where we were offered cake by another anonymous birthday girl (thank god for the power of alcohol), a couple of my friends sneaked into our empty house, decked up the place with balloons and paper streamers, switched off the lights, and screamed “happy birthday” (albeit a very feeble happy birthday given that we were only four people instead of some 25 people at Sweety Stores in campus) as we stepped into the house sharp at midnight, a little high, a little happy.
Sunday was chilled out, as all of us just lazed around the house, bitched about people, ate huge amounts of cake, ordered biryani and my flatmate dutifully paid homage to her temple (D Mart) on her birthday, buying groceries for the house and making me coffee!
So yes, this weekend was about the “TA DA!! Factor”, the alcohol connection, and yes, a bit of childhood: what with the birthday party and the children’s park…
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