Staying awake with cheesy Bollywood songs

This past weekend I was working on my portfolio, basically compiling my professional work until now. Since when, shall not be disclosed as I don’t want to date myself. Anyway I had made a portfolio a few years ago but it was prepared using Adobe Illustrator software. I have Adobe Photoshop at home, which although manufactured by Adobe is a raster program as opposed to Illustrator, which is vector. Uh-oh! I just out-geeked myself on this blog! K who at times is geekier than me rushed to my rescue. He is my knight in shining armor. He saves me from dragon like computer softwares. It didn’t work as I lost a lot of data. K suggested that I go to FedEx Kinko’s and just get a printout.

So Saturday evening we brave the last minute holiday shoppers to go to FedEx Kinko’s on Route 1. By the way someone told me this joke the other day; Brittany Spears has turned her husband from K-Fed to FedEx. I know….I know it’s not that funny but I still chuckled. Anyway I find that it is 40 cents a minute to use their graphic software. The desi in me, who looks for deals and bargains true to my desi-ness, had a mild heart attack. I told K that it is not worth it and I will go home and redo my portfolio. K, who cannot understand my kanjoos (miserly in Hindi) behavior, shakes his head in total disbelief. In my defense, I have a brand new printer and software so why in the world would I waste money at Kinko’s. So I am up Saturday night finishing stuff up. I spend the entire day Sunday and up Sunday night, finishing all the odds and ends. Fortunately I always make copies in triplicates so had CD’s floating around. I just could not remember where! Compiling stuff is a very tedious and time consuming process. I spent the entire weekend doing that as opposed to celebrating. We were invited to my husband’s friend’s home last night but I had to cancel. K went without me. Therefore the 2006 award for “Loser of the Year” goes to Sai from Sai Speak! (Taking a bow admist applause)

It took me back to my architecture days, not my loser behavior but staying up. My friends and I would stay up nights working on our assignments and listening to music and drinking umpteen cups of chai. One of my friends had his own studio in the building that his family owned. We all would work there as it was more fun working in groups as opposed to individually and also that it was easier staying awake. Our friend’s father was the sweetest. He would, as opposed to my friend’s mother, wake up at 4 or 5AM and make coffee or tea for all of us. He was an architect too therefore we all took him back to his student days. We would listen to Pink Floyd, Doors, Def Leppard, Zepplin. After a while, we would listen to cheesy Bollywood songs from the 80s and make parodies on them. Also one of our classmates was a lousy singer but we had convinced him that he sounded like Kishore Kumar, therefore that was one of our favorite exercises, to ask him to sing and make fun of him.

I also remember one incident when my friends and I were working on a class project. We were supposed to go on a field visit around 6AM so we needed to shower and eat something. My three friends and I decided to go to my parent’s home, which was the closest. The guys in our group told us that we girls needed their help and challenged us to walk by ourselves. My three friends and I got really angry and decided that we would walk and that we were self-reliant women who didn’t need men in our lives. So we set off at 4AM to go to my parent’s home, which was a ten minute walk (I lived in a very safe neighborhood that’s why all this bravado).

It was a balmy January morning. The only people on the road were the doodhwallas (milkmen). There was absolutely no one on the road except stray dogs (Stray dogs are a menace in India and a controversial issue in India, because of Maneka Gandhi and others). Stray dogs can be very territorial. One pack, consisting of five dogs, came towards us barking. I was ready to pass out with fear and my friend hissed….they smell fear so get a hold of yourself! Well anyway it took us half an hour to get to my parent’s home, as we took a detour, instead of the usual ten minutes! At the end of the exercise we felt really great that we crushed our classmate’s egos and relieved that the expression, barking dogs seldom bite, is indeed true! When we reached my parent’s home, my mother asked us who dropped us home. I said we walked and she started laughing and said to me, “Really you, of all the persons, braved the stray dogs?”

Last year when I went to India, I actually got a few 1980s Bollywood hits (not the cheesy ones though) that my friends and I used to listen to. K asked me when on earth I would listen to them. I did, last night and it was brought back fond memories of the good old days.