Rendezevous with G or Why 6 hr stop overs at Airports are good!!

As we were travelling abroad for some meetings the whole of this week, and could not find a direct flight from The Garden City (yeah right!!!) we were forced instead to fly through the "Commercial Capital of India". Plus we had a interminable 6hr stop over between connecting flights. Between cursing my travel agent, my manager, the folks who organised the meetings we realised that one of our old friends G who was unfortunate enough to be yours truly's wingie in the fresher year in an engineering institution located somewhere in the eastern part of the country stays there.

So much Orkutting ensued and we decided to meet. After talking quite some time and figuring out the latitudes and longitudes of where each of us were after landing at the airport we finally met and decided to have dinner at some non decrepit location just outside the airport.

Over something called American Dosa and Manchurian Dosa we reminisced about old times. A thing one notices about good friends is that when one meets them after a long time, it almost seems as though we never were away, conversation flows as freely as Madeira< in a Madhushala. So we began talking about how there was a time when MBAs were done by engineers who had nothing better to do in life and how now engineers who have nothing better to do still work in engineering. (OK that was an attempt at saying that more engineers do MBAs in a not too subtle manner falling flat on its face!!)

Conversation did turn very funny when we listened to the story of one of our more notorious batch mates D. Now D is a dangerous guy, the sort of person anyone and I mean anyone in EILITEPI #1 [1] shudders to be seen around with. Apparently G was infinitely embarrassed by juniors asking him how come that both him and D are from the same engineering institution.

So G came up with this truly astonishing idea. If someone asked G about D's origins before asking D then G would say he is from EILITEPI #2[2] instead of EILITEPI #1. So we naturally asked him but what happens when someone has already asked D before asking G. Then in a true mater piece, G said that he would tell them "Well he did turn up at EILITEPI #1 on a student exchange program with EILITEPI #2". We were clutching our stomachs with laughter. (You really have to meet D to really appreciate this story. If we could inspire TAM we just might get a post dedicated to D)

Then we got to discussing attendances and proxies in EILITEPI #1. Apparently a cheque signed by one of G's friends did not get accepted since the signature did not match with the one in their records. So G who had a long history of signing proxies for his friend signed it and it got accepted.

Another fascinating turn of discussion came up when we got talking about Stochastic Calculus. Interesting stuff G reads and our latest work might just involve a whole lot of calculus but god forbid the stochastic kind.

And so we talked about batch mates who are married, juniors who ask stupid questions, about post grad institutions that now have slots marked for students in classes for them to avoid proxies etc etc

By this time the waiter had come and stood at our table thrice expecting us to get up but we thick skinned just did not get up. After the fourth iteration we did manage to get our asses out of our temporary parking slot and catch an auto to the international airport.

Maybe the waiter was really frusth with us since we realised our watch was no longer on our hands, maybe them aliens had stolen it after telepathy's with the waiter.[3]

And before we finish this we need to say that the Mumbai domestic airport rocks, absolutely. And the international one was a disappointment in comparison to that.



Photo Courtesy : Wikipedia

[1] EILITEPI #1 --> Engineering Institution Located In The Eastern Part of India. Look at first link that this blog links to

[2] EILITEPI #2 --> Another Engineering Institution Located In The Eastern Part of India.

[3] An alterntive explanation propounded by G was that the loops of my watch strap had been torn quite some time back. Us in our capacity of infinite laziness had not fixed it and since the watch was anyway wound quite loosely around the wrist it would have fallen off since Newton came up with some ideas about the earth attracting apples towards it and stuff like that......We prefer our explanation of an inter galactic conspiracy!!