Tuesday 18 March 2014

CRICKET FEVER

Hi everyone, I am back after a very very ... very long time. If anybody knows how to cure laziness, please let me be the first one to know. It is going to be my ruin.

Today I will share one of my industrial training experience. The six month internship in hotel management is called Industrial Exposure Training. I did it from Lalit Ashok in Bangalore. It is one of the hardest period of our 3 years of picnic. It is the deciding point, whether one wants to stay in the industry or become a banker (that's what the rest seem to do, hope I don't join them).

Initially it was difficult but once you get used to it, you rule the place (not). Trainees are like the personal flunkies of the hotel employees. All the hard labor is done by them. The guys have it worse. They make them do longer shifts and are spoken to derogatorily sometimes. But I had it easy, sometimes being a girl has its perks (maybe once in 50 times! O_0). And i also used to look like a skeleton wearing huge shirt and trousers.... you wouldn't believe it if you saw me now. So the staff hardly gave me any work, one particular banquet steward would always send me to take rest even if i had just arrived. So I liked banquet too, which most of them hate.

I started working in the month of September and by the beginning of October I was sent to work in 24/7 - The Coffee Shop. My shift was from 7:00 am to 7:00pm. I worked there the whole month.. Somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd week there was a cricket event IPL or some such thing not really sure. I really don't understand the game and don't know much about it.

The story begins thus...

One cloudy morning  I was doing my daily chores of wiping the washed cutleries and plates of coffee shop in the back area blissfully unaware that the coffee shop was closed as the Indian cricket team was breakfasting there. A steward came up to me, shoved a bowl of fresh fruit salad in my hand and asked me to serve it to Ashish Nehra? beaming as if he had bestowed great honor upon me. I couldn't understand his demeanor and casually asked " Who is Ashish Nehra?". It was like some plane had crashed or something because of me. Whoever heard me dropped whatever they were doing and ganged up against me and in unison said "You don't know Ashish Nehra, You don't know your country's cricket players? Shame". And a chain of lecturing started, I was just blinking at them uncomprehendingly. While they were at it I was thinking about how many cricketers I knew. I know Sachin Tendulkar (Ofcourse, everubody knows HIM), Saurav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, Kapil Dev, Ajit Agarkar (only because we had a bio on him in 6th class english text), Sehwag, Dhoni and Irfan Pathan (I have a whole story on him alone). The staff must have thought I was really dumb because eventually they gave up on me and the steward himself went and served it to Ashish Nehra. :D. I just shrugged and got back to wiping dishes.

A while later I had to go into the restaurant- no escape. I hated going into the front section, but they were always sending me :(. Anyway, I had to keep the cutleries in the sideboards of restaurant, So I opened the door stepped in and stood there shell shocked and glued to the place. Now don't think that i was overwhelmed by looking at the real life cricketers standing in-front of me, after all they are humans (although a lot bigger than they seem on T.V. except... Mr.Tendulkar!).But the way the crowd was behaving outside the coffee shop (it has glass walls) was absolutely scary. I had never seen anything like it, I had heard about mob hysteria but never seen it; young boys were pressing against the glass, on the verge of tears at the sight of their heroes. girls screeching like wild cats and uncles and aunties clicking away ( hope somebody got a fine shot).



I just stood there with my eyes almost popping out. I was brought back to the present by Harbhajan Singh (Aha! I know him too), as he asked me for a fork and a bowl (in a very american accent? O_0). I gave him what he wanted and ran back inside breathing heavily like a marathoner.
I told the steward I'm not going back in there and he just looked at me like I had uttered obscenities. I realized that day that being a celebrity is hard work. Sure I had seen other famous people like Kunal Ganjhawala, Upendra, Kiran majumdar shaw, Pranab Mukherjee.... but nothing like the coffee shop incident.

So if you wanna be a celebrity, be ready to accept THE CRAZY FANS.