Picnic. A good old fashioned word. And exciting. And 29th September.
OK, so we’re all tenthies headed to Karjat on 29th September. For a picnic.
And (obviously!) I can’t STOP raving about it. All right, so I admit it. The water will bear astonishing resemblance to something gooey sprinkled with a generous helping of dead leaves. And the water slide will suspiciously look like a plastic pipe propped on a bundle of sticks. And the food will probably taste like minuscule specks of paneer have been dumped into a load of oil. But then, frankly my dears, we don’t give a damn!
Picnics have NEVER been about swanky resorts or gourmet dining (uh...until now at least!). They’ve always been about a bunch of people tunelessly shrieking their lungs out and grooving to the latest Bollywood numbers. They’ve always been about a guzzling your umpteenth bottle of Coke and begging a few bucks off someone to buy some more. They’ve always been about dunking people in the aforementioned pool. Picnics are –there’s no other word for it – cool.
The water thingy doesn’t EXACTLY fill my mind with ecstasy though. Because I wear ridiculously thick spectacles, and their removal causes everyone to resemble a bit of
brown fluff floating in space. Not alluring at all. Our teacher very solemnly warned us against dressing in ‘improper clothes’ (well, for a lady of umm…voluptuous proportions who wears old, patchy saris in the 21st century…that took loads of nerve!). And yeah…these improper clothes come in various shapes and forms. They are too short. And too tight. And too transparent. “Why don’t we just wear gunny sacks instead? So eco-friendly!” a snide voice quipped from behind the class. A few measly moments later, Snide Voice was languishing outside the class. Uh uh. The snide voice belonged to me.

I’m currently thumbing through a much-thumbed copy of the Eldest. Yup. The sequel to Christopher Paolini’s much touted Eragon. No. it cannot hold a flimsy candle to Harry Potter. Yes. You do start yawning after a few seconds. Yes. It does top my list of “you wasted oodles of trees by printing this book, you evil publisher, and should probably be dunked head first into the Artic when global warming begins to ravage our earth.” Phew!

The bit where Murtagh battles it out with Eragon is awesome though…with the dragons spewing fire and blades slashing, it should look incredible onscreen. But remembering the catastrophe which was a layered-with-oodles-of-makeup-and-constantly-changing-eye-color-which-merely-sugested-that-the-director-was-a-moron Daniel Radcliffe playing a wannabe Harry Potter, that’s not very likely to happen!
Ciao till next time!
Waiting damn eagerly for the picnic,
Chocoholic

Grr...Exams!

Today was MISERABLE day - the kind when even your usually cheerful horoscope comes with mumblings of dark happenings. (“You will be betrayed by a friend today” or “your partner will be moody and depressed”) I should have gotten the hint when I woke up with a humongous cold that threatened to flood by nostrils with mucus and other unmentionables. Or when my geyser suddenly abandoned its attempt to spout scalding hot water and emitted a stream of cold liquid that seemed like, a million degrees (no, billion. Heck, make that trillion. That’s not enough. HELP!) below freezing point. Then my red shirt (oh, the agonies of school uniform!) was triumphantly extracted from the debris under my bed, (uhh…my mom stores onions in there) adorned with creases that would have daunted a less haggard iron than mine.
That day I gave the most disastrous social paper ever written by yours truly in my fourteen year history. I crammed every clichéd mistake inside a paltry 20 mark paper. The process went something like this:
“What is federalism? How is federalism practiced?” glared the question from the Xeroxed paper.
“Hang on, I know this answer” said my cerebrum confidently. “I read it today morning.”
“No you don’t” said another (much hated) tiny portion smugly. “You read it yesterday morning.”
Uh. Uh.
How can I remember something stuffed inside my overcrowded brain when I was hogging cereal a day ago? Not fair.
So I peeked into my partner’s blank paper, moaned a little and started scribbling. The wrong answers.
Then I came home and howled at my mom, the creator of social studies, the tribe of history teachers and Napoleon for having lived in 1804 and not existing a century later, as my answer confidently assured my teacher, he did.
So my brain told me fiercely, I deserve compensation. So, I’m banging away on my keyboard now, on the eve of my science exam, having shoved every edible molecule within sight into my stomach’s capacious depths. At the moment, even a moody and depressed partner would be a welcome interruption. Or the arrival of the traitorous friend happily promised by my morning horoscope.
But then, *small sigh* horoscopes always have an alarming tendency to be mistaken.