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.

Air Pollution???!!!

Everyday  when I wake up, I wish for a pleasant, refreshing morning, so I can be chirpy for the rest of the day..... But I never am :(, because of the early morning fragrance I'm forced to experience. I have a sharp nose and weak stomach. A whiff of garbage and my stomach makes it's presence felt! Let me tell you my almost daily routinue: As soon as I get up I go brush my teeth as i can't stand the smell of my own breath (my stomach is objecting as i write this...bleccch!). After I get ready for work my smelly day begins, on the bus. It takes me 2 hrs to reach destination- work,  so i've all the time in the world to check if my olfactory nerves are in working condition...
So today when i got on the already crowded Majestic bus, everything seemed rather smelled alright. But halfway through the journey my nose sensed that somebody had eaten either potato, or cholay, or simply forgotten to release their excrement! Imagine my plight - bus fully crowded with absoloutely no space for fresh air to circulate. At this rate i'll be amazed if i don't get 'Asthama' or 'Bronchitis' or something.My dear friends please put extra efforts into ejecting your digestive excess. Half an hour later i was glad to get out of that bus.. phewwww!! My journey led me to another bus. I was hoping to get a window seat on the HAL bus with nice wind gushing on my face, but I get stuck in between ladies. one of them had forgotten to brush her teeth, and was standing right next to me :(. She was good looking, well dressed and all that but her realitywas known when she opened her mouth ugggh! When she spoke, the dosa i had eaten for breakfast started moving against the force of gravity.(No thankfully i did not throw up!). Another request my dear friends please, PLEASE brush your teeth and step out of the house, it could be tortuous to your fellow travelers, Close-up, Colgate, Pepsodent were all made for your usage so USE it! So how do you think the rest of my day went??!!

Mumbai

I had been to Mumbai last week (not exactly Mumbai, outskirts in Panvel) with my friend for a job interview. More than the interview it ended up being an eating extravaganza. The both of us used to feel very hungry. I think 'used to' is an understatement for me because I'm always hungry. In college i keep telling my friends I'm hungry (in a weird sort of tune) and their reply used to be "when are you not".... nowadays they just ignore me :(.. At home my mum gets irritated if i say I'm hungry and asks me to eat her (bleccch). Well this blog isn't about my hunger it is about our food adventure in Mumbai. 

The day we reached Panvel the first thing we reached and told each other is "I'm Hungry",my friend said "come lets go try the great Mumbai food which the guys keep talking about). The best food is always the street food prepared in the most un-hygenic way...lol! We went out to have the world famous mumbayya vada pav (....ummmm my mouth is watering as i write this). Unfortunately coudn't find any nearby so we went on towards the market (at the time we had no idea where the market was so were wandering) and finally found a gaadiwaala selling vada pav. The vada pav was good but not one of the best i had. Mission Accomplished we thought, but our stomachs weren't satisfied and we were too lazy to walk back to the gaadiwala when suddenly a sweet savoury smell penetrated our nostrils and led us straight to the pani puri waala. We ate the most awsomest pani puri ever. He made the perfect combination of sweet and spice... ummmm... the filling of white batana (white peas) goes very well, better than potato. I've got to try that at home. And the best part of the pani puri is the digestif they give in the end (I dunno what exactly it is called, I call it digestif because he gives it at the end and not because  it has helped in digestion nor do i've a digestive problem :p). It was so good we asked for another one,had to pay for it though. Thus began our gastronomic journey in new Panvel, Navi Mumbai!

 We did not have any interview next day so we went toMmumbai. We met up with another friend from college and he showed us around mumbai. My friend wanted to "feed the pegions" so we went to Gateway of India. As soon as we reached there she asks why are we here? so she was reminded by us that she wanted to feed the pegions. When she saw those healthy pegions she said " everybody's feeding the pegion, that's why they are so FAT (with full pressure on the word). What about me someone has to feed me i'm hungry too". My mumbai friend was amazed at the role reversal as I'm the one thats always hungry. The secret is i was hungry i just didnt say it out loud. So we were looking about for street vendors and had just spotted a samosawala, before we could reach him, he ran away like the wind. We started wondering what happened when my friend spotted municipal people confiscating goods and cameras. And hence 3 hungry people went out looking for places to eat.We couldn't find anything as it was sunday. We decided to go to Nariman point as my pegion feeding friend also wanted to see marine drive, in her words" place with huge rocks and water splashing all over them". We got lost while going to nariman point when my mumbai friend takes out his brand new android phone to see where we are and how far we are from nariman point. In the end we decided to take a taxi there. We reached there and we were still hungry. We thought we'll find something there but to our disappointment there were hardly any people there let alone the street vendors :( . Finally a chana zor garam waala spotted me (I guess i looked hungry!) and I bought one of those. It was awsomely tangy just the way i like it. 

Then we went to church gate station. Wanna guess why we went there? To eat ofcourse. I bought a chicken frankie, which was totally horrible(Bangalore frankies way better...seriously o_O). We spotted wimpy's but my friend didnt want to eat there and so we went down and found a chat corner and ate ragda patties. That was good too. I guess our eating expedition for the day ended there as we went shopping after that. But I guess our friends the municipality people had a problem with us that day, they appeared near church gate too. We were asking the rate of a jacket and the keeper was about to answer when he spotted them and bolted like a lightning. And i spotted the municipal vehicle and cursed them. Later i saw that guy(municipal officer) staring at me. They went wherever we went. I got a feeling that he was following us. To my relief they whizzed off after a minute. They didn't confiscate anything they were just stuck in traffic:D.. After shopping we sat on the local train and went back to Panvel. My friend was horrified as well as glad to see passengers hanging from the train as she always wanted to see that.. 

There ends our adventure as the next two days were reserved for interview. No we did not get the job, but we did get to eat delicious junk food! So if any of you are going to Mumbai the first thing on your to do list must be TO EAT ALL YOU CAN.