Precious taste buds

Brunchinner!

I have a habit of having a heavy brunch  -- breakfast plus lunch, literally -- whenever I feel hungry at around 10am, the mess is closed, I am not in the comforts of my room, and when I know I am too lazy to come back to the mess from wherever I would be after filling my tummy. But brunchinner... that's on a completely different level! Fine, I am exaggerating.

    That day, all the gods, the old and the new, the sheep god, the light god, the horse god, all of them decided to torture me in the 4th level of library (which sounds like the 4th level of hell... I know, right?). First my earphones ditched me. Then my nakama deserted me. Heck, even my nokia embraced martyrdom! How do I know that the gods had conspired against me, you ask? Well, the dark omens were pellucid right from the moment I placed my order at Tifanys.

    It all began at the counter, where a ultra-pseud putting ma'am bitch was noting down our orders. And the following conversation ensued:

Me: One chennai paratha. One Ghee Roast Masala Dosa...
Ma'am: <with raised eyebrows> Ghee Roast??
Me: ...Masala Dosa. And... one Sambar Vada and one Medu Vada. Yes, that's all.
Ma'am: 100 rupees.
Me: Okay. Thank you.

    I accept my mistake that I didn't take a good look at the bill before handing it over to the lady who would soon surprise me to more than my tummy could take, literally.  Add to it my ignorance of the fact that there's no such item as Ghee Roast Masala dosa. Ghee Roast and Ghee Masala Dosa do exist -- the latter is the one which I mentally re-christened as Ghee Roast Masala Dosa. Stupid me. 

    And I paid for it! Trust me. The good old lady, who brought my food, also brought the following bill to the notice of a surprised me:

One Chennai Paratha
One Ghee Roast
Two Masala Dosa
One Sambar Vada
One Medu Vada

     Breakfast plus Lunch plus Dinner. Brunchinner. *sigh* I was feeling very sheepish, hoping no one would notice all the plates in front of me. For the first time, I was cursing all the girls who come to Tifanys. Must. Not. Make. Eye Contact.

   Needless to say, the lady at the counter did a poor job of natural language processing, particularly at spell-checking and pragmatics. She simply tokenized my words and took the result for my order. I am still puzzled at why the lady at the counter asked "Ghee Roast??" if she had already parsed "Ghee Roast Masala Dosa" as two different dishes. With no one like the voracious Sujeet to accompany me, I tried on my own to eat with an appetite unlike that of someone of my physical stature. I failed.

Curse of the Dominoes

Saturday night. Dominoes "buy 1 pizza get 1 free" coupon. 4 hungry friends.

    With two out of four friends being harami, it fell upon the more innocent couple, Surya and myself, to fetch the pizzas from the Taramani gate. Fucking free-riders! But something made it even more frustrating. Enter an unexpected rainstorm.

     We waited for half an hour, hoping the gods, the old and the new, the sheep... you know how it goes... would have mercy. But as our mumbling stomachs took over our patience, we set out with umbrellas. Nevertheless, we were more than half-way drenched while we reached the Taramani Gate. To our utter disappointment, the pizza guy was nowhere to be seen. It was all dark outside the gate. Cellular conversations followed.

    As we waited for our peace-putting guys in the hostel to confirm the location of the pizza guy, two girls (one of them pretty hot) entered the Taramani Gate. Fully drenched. Without any umbrella or raincoat, they tottered along the way filled with ankle-deep muddy water, while we enjoyed the show from the security kiosk... err... I mean, while we were feeling sorry for their situation. :-|

    When they arrived and were figuring out their options, being a civilized and caring IITian, I was very much tempted to offer my umbrella to one of them (she was more beautifully drenched, after all). But I thought Surya would interpret otherwise. So I asked him whether we should "help" them in some way. He was hesitant, saying, "how can we help?" Dumbass!

    There were no signs of the downpour slowing down. So the girls, probably embarrassed at having five men staring at them through the corner of their eyes, decided to carry on to their hostel, knowing that the rain couldn't do more damage. Opportunity lost, I must say. :(

    Later in the hostel, as we were tearing apart the cheese-bursts, this incident made for a interesting discussion. One of the harami friends remarked that lending the umbrella and meeting later (at CCD?) for getting it back indeed was an interesting prospect. The possibilities.

    And thus, another forever alone Saturday night was well spent.