The trip to Chennai !

Note : This one's been trimmed down from what I'd posted earlier.

My sis and bro-in-law had their house-warming ceremony in Chennai this morning. I was supposed to leave with my parents for Chennai the day before, but thanks to some urgent office work, had to leave yesterday. After about 50 'The last and final call for passengers travelling to Nagpur...' announcements, boarding began for the flight to Chennai. The journey was uneventful. Upon reaching Chennai, my parents said we needed to immediately go to a wedding reception, and that was when the adventure began.

Upon reaching the place, we were greeted with blaring music that, we discovered was being earnestly produced by a band indoors. We quicky wished the bride and groom , and were off to have dinner in the adjacent hall. The scene there - it was atrocious to say the least. People were seated on chairs arranged in long rows aside a table, which was fine. There was a constant flood of people waiting for these folks to finish eating so that they could eat, which was also fine. What was horrible was this - Just as someone was more than half-way through his meal, someone would walk over and stand embarassingly close to the chair, so that he could pounce on the chair as soon the guy had finished eating. The technique seemed to be all about stalking and pouncing .This seemed incredibly rude to us, as the people eating were constantly being reminded that they need to vacate the chair soon.

We decided to have dinner outside at a restaurant, and were almost out of the place when my sis showed her inability to utter white lies , by responding to the host with a 'No', when asked ' Did you all have your dinner?' The host was shocked and brushed aside all our concerns about the place being too crowded . We went back to the food-mela to check if any new stampede-forms had invaded the place in our absence. The musical chairs ritual was still in progress, though the crowd didn't seem to mind the fact that chairs were in short supply, and uninterrupted 'music' came from the adjacent hall. We went back to the main hall hoping that human density in the place would fall soon. The music was terrible. The lead singer's singing was at once both not of note, and off-note. Ridiculous crowd behaviour coupled with terrible music was beginning to drive me nuts. I set off pugnaciously in the direction of the guy who sat on the mixer. Upon reaching him, I noticed that the master volume was set at max - A perfect recipe for getting an acoustic guitar to sound like a distortion one. I asked him to cut down the volume, which he did promptly, but that didn't seem to help as the percussioninst was violently pounding the drums, with the net effect that we were directly listening to the 'music' from the stage instead of the amplifiers.

We went back to examine the musical-chairs ritual, and caught hold of an errand boy to help us find a place to sit. The boy, eager to demonstrate his proactive nature sprinted around the place, and then excitedly called out for us from a corner. We rushed there to find him clasping a chair tightly. A single chair didn't quite meet our needs, since there were five of us.So we had to restrict ourselves to casting approving glances at that fine piece of furniture, and asking the boy to hand it over to another needy man. The boy, apparently pained at our lack of appreciation for his noble act, left in a huff. By then I was convinced we should leave the place, but my mother insisted that we stay, eat and leave so as to not offend the host.

After about 30 minutes of waiting we manged to find ourselves places to sit, without resorting to the stalk and pounce technique. Food was being served on banana leaves. I have never liked eating from banana leaves for several reasons. For one, I always feel clumsy eating from them, having to manage a number of items on the plate , with no boundary wall on the leaf to ensure that everything stayed indoors. Secondly, on each occasion in the past when a liquidy thing(like sambhar) had been poured on my leaf, it invariable overflowed, and ended up adorning my pants, leaving a bright patch that, Murphy's law ensured, contrasted beautifully with the color of pants. I was determined to not let that happen this time around and firmly refused any non -solid substance that was offered. The musical-chairs game had left deeply suspicious of the food in general, and my suspicions were well-founded after all, as a waiter emerged with paper cups and a jug of water.He systematically inserted his forefinger 2 inches into the water to hold the cup, and then placed it on the table. My meal was done in no time, and we all headed home, and went to bed.

The house warmng ceremeony happened the next day, but no details of that here.