EVENTS

This page seeks to track and re-live those wonderful moments that some of us had in each others' company. Read on....

What started as a casual evening call between two people in the bunch, snowballed into plans of a re-union flying back and forth with hectic fury. While there apparently was a plan to meet up among a few of us, it would not have matched the excitement of more of us meeting upo under the same roof. The venue was chosen as Cincinnati because it was equidistant from most places where the others resided, equally near by all modes of transit for different people, and also because Karthik is a great host!

A recap of who was where before making the trip.

Karthik, the host, Cincinnati

Sandesh & Sujatha, New York

Radhakrishnan & Vinod, Kansas City

Sangeeta, Minneapolis

Satish (& Kanthi), Boston

Abdul & Mohan, Toronto

Vinod subsequently pulled out due to work exigencies.

Radha, Sujatha, and Sangeeta who vied with one another to get to the place before anybody else got that part of their objective screwed in the shape of a freak storm that threw all flight schedules out of order! Rumour has it that Radha had 6 tickets at different times in the day to ensure that he was first. He was the last of the trio to arrive!

Sangeeta and Karthik, in their bid to locate each other were referencing similar landmarks on different levels in the airport, and took almost as much time finding each other as it took Sangeeta to fly down from Minneapolis!

Sandesh, Sangeeta and Sujatha were made to wait until Karthik could locate the map of the airport building in the maintenance room!

No sooner had they freshened up, the urge to hit the bar hit them harder than a McGuire home run shot, and what transpired later was lost in a mix of haziness, wooziness and fuzziness…ran out of synonyms there!

Meanwehile two twosomes were in diametrically opposite situations when it came to their relative velocities. Satish and Kanthi sweated it out on the runway, and had Murphy's law work on them cruelly, after being first in line to take off after a zillion-hour wait they turned aroundand the pilot nearly announced Boston was Cincinnati! Abdul and Mohan were pounding '60s Tamil music in an effort to coax the road to move faster underneath them. The car won the day over the plane that saw Abdul & Mohan arrive barely a minute before Satish & Kanthi. On a separate note, it's kinda appropriate that there was a Kanthi in the crowd, a name to perpetuate the memory of Chinmaya. Kanthi, to those who have amnesia, was our English teacher - so much a part of our times in Chinmaya.

Lunch was at a Mexican joint, where Mohan proceeded to catch a few (ghostly) images with his magic-cam. Everyone ordered food like they were ravenous (maybe a reaction to seeing their school buddies around - school-time was always a period of perennial hunger!) and most barely finished their stuff. A grand plan to bask in the sunshine on a hill overlooking a muddy river came to nought when ants started to use the confines of our clothes to protect themselves against the same sun that was searing our skin. Abdul thanked the ants as he felt incomplete (as a man?!) without his camera.

Apparently no trip is complete without chocolates or ice cream being consumed, or so the girls had us believe. So we drove through a beautiful wooded area into uh-ho, an ice-cream parlour, where some of us learnt that ice-creams could be consumed in those quantities consumed. Kanthi, took the prize for the most "kg hundred tonnes" of ice-cream consumed, and profusely apologized to Satish for not having offered him any...after the last molecule of the sinful stuff was cleaned out!!

The excessive beer flowing probably 'hit' Karthik, and he came up what must be described as a brilliant idea - play volleyball in a nearby arena. After all, we did have a tradition in the game. Most of the team that represented the school were right there, with a few wildcards (the girls) thrown in for good measure!

People still showed remarkable skill, with Satish still being the brightest star. The girls were given a handicap of an extra serve, and that kinda evened things out. They showed remarkable spirit and that prevented the game from being turned into a sham. Apart from a minor mishap, when the volleyball ricocheted off Satish's hand and smashed into the unsuspecting sunglass-shod face of Sangeeta (for which she took back the only souvenir of the whole trip - a teeny weeny blood clot on the nose), the game went exceedingly well.

Radha working on an athletic build, saw it fit that everyone else see it too! So he proceeded to play the game sans a t-shirt, and his childlike water-play with Sandesh after the game raised more than a few eyebrows in the neighborhood! Trudging back with muddy feet, the evening promised to be of a level of unknown excitement(except for Radha, who knew exactly what he wanted to do!), the cans of beer flowed with equal felicity as the water washing the mud off our feet and bodies.

With the designated drivers in place (Abdul & Satish), the spirit of wide abandon continued through a protracted dinner session that ate into the available time. A game of bowling ensued in the gloomy inside of an entertainment joint, with nothing much to note. Karthik seemed to have home court advantage and creamed the rest of us!

Radha, the entertainment advisor for the evening, collected everybody, cleaned out our belongings left there, and gulped down all and sundry beers he had ordered late, and set about to the place as if it were his place of calling - the discotheque! While the choice of disco wasn't discussed, sentiments were echoed later of the kind of music played there - something of very little academic value. Trance, played in the discotheque was kinda appropriate as it seemed that nine of us had a singular purpose and seemed to be moving in unison - as though in a trance!

Amidst the blaring horns of excited, stoned and pissed teenagers and revellers in America's Singles City, we made our way back to base and reminisced of our times at Chinmaya and the evening that seemed to have slipped by so quickly. Mohan came into his elements and provided a peerless mimic performance of all and sundry from Gopinath to the way Marwari cricketers play in Toronto! It was hilarious and enjoyed even by Kanthi, who had very little background of the events. A truly memorable part of the night.

One by one all of us drifted off to sleep in the nooks and crannies of Karthik's apartment. There were no "I am going to sleep now" statements. Everyone was around till their senses failed them.

Some of us guys were woken up by the sounds of the early morning gossiping by the girls. A photo session ensued with the most unkempt looks being frozen for posterity.

The time for the inevitable had come. Sandesh, Sangeeta, Mohan, Abdul, Kanthi, Satish, Sujatha and Radha left, and carried with them into their mundane lives the memories of an exquisite weekend!

Cinncinnati Trip
[June 15th, 2001]!

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