Update: Mood is cheerful now. In fact, mood returned to cheerful soon after writing the last post 🙂 Blogging about it did help.

Btw.. a B’lated “Very Happy Republic Day” to you all! Hope you guys had a fun filled holiday.  We did !

I present to you our Republic day story…. but first.. the context…

The problem of being a working couple is that you are so used to 5 days of work and a 2 day weekend.. that when you are confronted with the prospect of getting one more day in the week off.. you are so confused! You don’t know whether you should plan a “getaway”.. and when you try to.. you realise that it is too late to plan, as all the hotels are booked .. and there is no company as all your friends have flown away to exotic destinations (read mumbai). Then you decide that you’ll “chill” at home.. only to realise that chilling at home gets boring after chilling for 40 hrs of a long weekend 😀 and then finally… you seek recourse in long drive plans down familiar highway roads to familiar eating joints to break the monotony (how ironic!)

And so.. in keeping with our favorite thing to do…we drove down to A2B on the B’lore-Chennai highway for dosa. Now A2B on that road is not exactly the best place for food… its a highway restaurant. And the one thing you learn when you start living in the south of the country is that dosa is not an “all time” menu item. At breakfast, you get breakfast time items.. at lunch you get “Meals”… in the evening, you get ‘Tiffin” items and then for dinner… guess what.. you get “Meals” again.  I have a theory around this… somehow Northies are satisfied and satiated with a Dosa or a Chole Bhature as a meal any time of the day, but apparently Southies like their food structured 😀  No rice… no lunch…. no rice… no dinner…. and all the assorted delicious things that most North Indians are used to.. like idlis and dosa, and utthapam and pongal.. are either breakfast or tiffin 🙂

When we reached it was lunch time… and so.. no dosa…and so then we had to order 2 south indian meals. Food and a Nimboos each later.. we were sauntering down to our car.. when I saw a very familiar face.. in googles… ( I’d call them googles.. coz.. they weren’t the ubercool shades that celebs wear.. or the nouveau riche in south Delhi… they were googles… like in the eye popping out goofy smiley  in MSN chats.. something like  )  And it turned out that this was a friend of mine, whom I had met through a common friend some 4 years back in the UK… and who I was now meeting in an A2B, near a place called SAPPADI.. LOL!

Hubby was introduced.. and we proceeded to chat a bit.. during which H realises that the man has a pronounced Bengali accent and the lady has a pronounced Oriya accent…  trust H to notice these sort of things, but then he has been an Indiafarer for all his life. Anyway… after a little small talk… we bid farewell to them, promising to meet up in B’lore later.

And then the funnies struck 🙂 And H began to sing all sorts of Bengali songs ( songs unheard of even by bengali themselves.. obviously.. since he was making them on the fly) and proceeded to sing them in his “Kamal Hasan” voice all the way back to good ‘ol B’lore.. with me chipping in with a gutsy “Oye Hoye” now and then.

LOL! yes.. so this is how we celebrated Republic Day…singing Bengali songs in a Tam Actor’s voice, with Punjabi overtones ( or undertones ) by a Delhiite.. on a 2 hr drive back into the state of Karnataka.

If this is not national integration … then I don’t know what is! 🙂