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Christmas

Ajay Dhyani had been threatening for the past two days to visit us for Christmas. He demanded fish for lunch. Figuring that the relative tranquility of Christmas was now under serious threat, I decided to play safe and buy some fish to satiate my over-zealous buddy.

No fish. The only fish shop I know was about 2kms away from home and walking all the way up to it proved entirely futile since it was closed. Santosh had earlier refused to give me company to the shop though he did offer to cook. That could only mean one thing: my brisk morning walk was doubly boring. I lurked for some time hoping the shutter would be upped...but to no avail.

Danger now loomed large over our dwelling and I was totally helpless. Resigning to fate, I returned home and prepared for the worst. I decided to send a smoke signal to Dhyani and SMSed him that the mission to procure fish had failed. He could bring something instead.

The wannabe assailant was probably slumbering. He sent me a late message saying that he would show up at our place in the evening. It's 1857 hrs as I write this but our friend has yet to show up. So far, so good.

Santosh & I settled for vanilla Egg Curry for lunch.

I've been busy over the past week downloading episodes from Season 1 of The Wonder Years. The task finally came to its fruition only a few hours ago and I thoroughly enjoyed watching them. The Wonder Years had been jostling for scant bandwidth all this while with Santosh's idea of effective utilization of the Net: streaming clips of The Great Indian Laughter Show on YouTube. So each time YouTube was pressed into service to stream the pathetic episodes, The Wonder Years was cruelly suspended. I silently suffered the ignominy. Santosh, however, did make some noise over the video download button form Firefox suddenly disappearing. He quizzed me and I professed nothing but ignorance. So how did the button mysteriously vanish anyway? Don't ask me!

Laughter is a scant resource, that's my conclusion after suffering the lethally drab episodes for endless hours. The jokes that were funny were the ones you'd already heard somewhere before. The ones that weren't even remotely funny (and this forms the bulk of the show) were those that owed their existence to impromptu concoctions. Are people actually bribed to laugh at the show? Must investigate.

So what was so Christmasy about today? We didn't have cakes, I'm yet to play the carols and I really couldn't catch any glimpse of celebrations anywhere in the city. Still, the though that man, terribly flawed though he is, has strived to conceive institutions that reflect the triumph of good over evil is a heart-warming thought and I revel in it. That's Christmas for me.

Comments

Anonymous said…
hey man .....i am really sorry but that's a promise we will have fish at your place before we welcome new year.

Ajay
Deepanjan said…
No probs! But this time you get the fish. I've toiled enough!

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