Inktober Prompt - Scorched
Well, er.... um....
We have gone way past October and well into January of 2019 and I still haven't gone through the entire list of prompts. However, quite a few interesting things have happened since the last prompt I attempted to write for, and I hope they'll suffice to make for interesting content in the following few posts at least.
Every January, for about five days or so, IIT Madras conducts its annual cultural fest 'Saarang'. It's a spectacular affair, complete with a whole host of events, shows, stalls and food tests. My mother used to be a professor at the institute, and back then, I remember looking forward a great deal to getting the official t-shirts specifically designed for the year. Fast forward to around two years ago and my friends and I were sent from school to participate in one of the multiple quizzes conducted for kids from schools at Saarang.
As is the norm, we got off at the famous 'Gajendra Circle' and began walking towards this enormous banner that marked entry into the proverbial ' portals of the other side', when we stopped short at the Information Desk because we thought we had a great idea for a prank. (Well, not so much a prank as a silly dare, but we were stupid enough to think we were geniuses for coming up with it and I remember finding it extraordinarily hilarious too, at the time.) Anyway, the broad idea was for one of us to approach the people at the Information Desk and repeatedly ask for 'information' and pretend to be daft when they would ask the logical next question of 'information about what?', and then repeat the process all over again.
Given that only one amongst the three of us is always sporting enough to go through with dares without chickening out, one of my friends ended up with the onus of execution as usual. I vividly remember exactly how ridiculously amusing to watch the volunteers get through the following gamut of emotions/ facial expressions:
eager to help-what is wrong with you- why are you wasting my time- get lost before I break your bones.
Fast forward again to around two month ago when I was watching 'A Bit of Fry and Laurie' and chanced upon the following two minute sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr1IXB194aE.
Assuming you did, I'm sure you can imagine exactly how mindblown and shocked my friends and I would have been when we realised that our silly dare was astonishingly similar to a sketch template from two geniuses of comedy. And all of a sudden, 'nostalgia' of sorts set in and we decided to attend Saarang again in 2019.
And so, along with two more from our gang, five of us made our way on Saturday the 12th to Guindy.
We had a great time at the fest, (the details of which I'm going to skip and perhaps save for another post) but when it was time for us to leave, we booked a cab and requested the driver to arrive at the Gajendra Circle. Now, for those of you who don't know, there is a yawning three kilometre gap from the Gajendra Circle to the actual buildings and structures at the institute and there are buses plying back and forth every fifteen minutes.
The stall where t-shirts were sold was at the very entrance to the institute and having purchased what we liked on our way out, for some absolutely retarded reason, the five of us began to walk back! I honestly have NO IDEA what we were thinking at the time, or in fact whether we were thinking at all. We had split into two mini groups and the two most responsible ones had taken the lead while the other two and I were just following them while yapping away to glory. To be honest, I don't think the latter mini group of us realised what we had gotten ourselves into until we had walked for around ten minutes or so and there seemed to be no end in sight. It did not help that one of my friends was, in the process, also holding up someone else with whom she'd made plans.
The weather in Chennai has been surprisingly and remarkably pleasant these past few months, with an odd exception here and there, but of course, as luck would have it, on 12.01.2019, the sun just had to be at its blazing worst. Yeah, (I've finally managed to around to the prompt,) it was absolutely scorching and our water bottles were empty. In fact, one of my friends even had a shoe bite so I honestly have no idea how she made it to the end in one piece.
It also did not help that the cab driver who was scheduled to arrive in 10 minutes ended up 7 minutes earlier. This, under normal circumstances would have been fantastic because I'm sure nobody needs a briefing about the trials of getting our cab driver to arrive at your 'location' but given that we had NO IDEA when we would ever get to the end of 3 kilometres, it became a pain. At one point, the 'Gajendra Circle', began to seem to be a myth; a figment of fiction and we even began to see mirages along the way.
But as the adage goes, everything must come to an end and so did our exhausting walk at the end of half an hour. The relief we felt upon the elephant statues coming into our line of sight was nothing short of what Edmund Hilary or Tenzing Norgay would have felt at the summit of Mt. Everest.
It was most certainly a trying experience but on hindsight, is actually pretty funny. So the next time someone dares to throw the cliched 'the journey is more important than the destination' quote to me, I shall be prepared to throttle them with my bare hands.
We have gone way past October and well into January of 2019 and I still haven't gone through the entire list of prompts. However, quite a few interesting things have happened since the last prompt I attempted to write for, and I hope they'll suffice to make for interesting content in the following few posts at least.
Every January, for about five days or so, IIT Madras conducts its annual cultural fest 'Saarang'. It's a spectacular affair, complete with a whole host of events, shows, stalls and food tests. My mother used to be a professor at the institute, and back then, I remember looking forward a great deal to getting the official t-shirts specifically designed for the year. Fast forward to around two years ago and my friends and I were sent from school to participate in one of the multiple quizzes conducted for kids from schools at Saarang.
As is the norm, we got off at the famous 'Gajendra Circle' and began walking towards this enormous banner that marked entry into the proverbial ' portals of the other side', when we stopped short at the Information Desk because we thought we had a great idea for a prank. (Well, not so much a prank as a silly dare, but we were stupid enough to think we were geniuses for coming up with it and I remember finding it extraordinarily hilarious too, at the time.) Anyway, the broad idea was for one of us to approach the people at the Information Desk and repeatedly ask for 'information' and pretend to be daft when they would ask the logical next question of 'information about what?', and then repeat the process all over again.
Given that only one amongst the three of us is always sporting enough to go through with dares without chickening out, one of my friends ended up with the onus of execution as usual. I vividly remember exactly how ridiculously amusing to watch the volunteers get through the following gamut of emotions/ facial expressions:
eager to help-what is wrong with you- why are you wasting my time- get lost before I break your bones.
Fast forward again to around two month ago when I was watching 'A Bit of Fry and Laurie' and chanced upon the following two minute sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr1IXB194aE.
Assuming you did, I'm sure you can imagine exactly how mindblown and shocked my friends and I would have been when we realised that our silly dare was astonishingly similar to a sketch template from two geniuses of comedy. And all of a sudden, 'nostalgia' of sorts set in and we decided to attend Saarang again in 2019.
And so, along with two more from our gang, five of us made our way on Saturday the 12th to Guindy.
We had a great time at the fest, (the details of which I'm going to skip and perhaps save for another post) but when it was time for us to leave, we booked a cab and requested the driver to arrive at the Gajendra Circle. Now, for those of you who don't know, there is a yawning three kilometre gap from the Gajendra Circle to the actual buildings and structures at the institute and there are buses plying back and forth every fifteen minutes.
The stall where t-shirts were sold was at the very entrance to the institute and having purchased what we liked on our way out, for some absolutely retarded reason, the five of us began to walk back! I honestly have NO IDEA what we were thinking at the time, or in fact whether we were thinking at all. We had split into two mini groups and the two most responsible ones had taken the lead while the other two and I were just following them while yapping away to glory. To be honest, I don't think the latter mini group of us realised what we had gotten ourselves into until we had walked for around ten minutes or so and there seemed to be no end in sight. It did not help that one of my friends was, in the process, also holding up someone else with whom she'd made plans.
The weather in Chennai has been surprisingly and remarkably pleasant these past few months, with an odd exception here and there, but of course, as luck would have it, on 12.01.2019, the sun just had to be at its blazing worst. Yeah, (I've finally managed to around to the prompt,) it was absolutely scorching and our water bottles were empty. In fact, one of my friends even had a shoe bite so I honestly have no idea how she made it to the end in one piece.
It also did not help that the cab driver who was scheduled to arrive in 10 minutes ended up 7 minutes earlier. This, under normal circumstances would have been fantastic because I'm sure nobody needs a briefing about the trials of getting our cab driver to arrive at your 'location' but given that we had NO IDEA when we would ever get to the end of 3 kilometres, it became a pain. At one point, the 'Gajendra Circle', began to seem to be a myth; a figment of fiction and we even began to see mirages along the way.
But as the adage goes, everything must come to an end and so did our exhausting walk at the end of half an hour. The relief we felt upon the elephant statues coming into our line of sight was nothing short of what Edmund Hilary or Tenzing Norgay would have felt at the summit of Mt. Everest.
It was most certainly a trying experience but on hindsight, is actually pretty funny. So the next time someone dares to throw the cliched 'the journey is more important than the destination' quote to me, I shall be prepared to throttle them with my bare hands.
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