Trip to Shankarpur

The stage is set

The CIM animal and the FD datasets family decided to have an outing to Shankarpur. Polar and Sudu did the mail rounds, the Confused hanuman had all the funds,Gogo persuaded us for an AC bus and Sayantan books the accomodation and we were off on 2 September 5.00 PM after the UK friends did their very best to 'gift' us a timely delay. Luggages were packed in, so were we and the bus screeched itself out of its inertia.
The journey begins
Everyone waited for some one to start off something. No one did. Shatadru started playing his mandolin and Sayantan joined it with some folk songs. Shatadru was in 'undrunken' drunken mode gibbering all kinds of nonsense out of thin air. I wondered how he would look when he was actually drunk . Then the brains of analytics began on some lateral thinking ventures. A wide range of scenarios were uncovered from the heart breaking "He ran into the corridor" , the mysteriously melodramatic "The music stopped and she died" and the gross yet touching "Albatross sandwich" .
Then the real action started- Antakshari. I cant call it singing .I chose action for a lack of a word to describe the screaming we undertook to send shock waves through the bus. So action it is. It was boys vs girls and by that itself you must now that is not much of a competition is it? and won hands down. Aditi and Gargi notably among the girls gave quite a fight and tried their best. They were at their innovative best as they conjured quite a few unheard songs( some I suspect dont really exist) and unbelievably novel beginnings to suit the need of the hour. however Sayantan and Anshul were the stars and they pinned them down with songs ending in 'ra' and beat them to submission.

The next usual suspect as a time-killer for the 5 hour journey was Dumb C. Gogo then made a grand entry into the 'The gender struggle" scene with a challenge that you will never guess this in a hundred years. The look in Aditi's face said it all. There were a few fireballs in her eyes as she accepted that challenge. Of course they found it eventually after irking Gogo to repeat the name a 100 times ! Soumyaa was in her usual " Main kaun hoon? Main kahan hoon?" form at remembering names and her forgetting 'Teenage mutant ninja turles- The secret of the ooze' was the last straw in gogo-camel's back.

Dumb C ended without any knockout punch for both the sides. However in the final analysis I could award it to the girls on points. The females did prove their expertise at dumbness! Men cant really beat them at that can they? They just have too much practise and spanning many a generations...
With scores 0-0 between the two gladiator teams, we reached Shankarpur at 10 pm, ravenous and drop-dead tired. We barged into the eating house ( mess or restaurant- what ever you wish to call it) with our luggage. The place was not exactly visually aesthetic and the insect circling over the food was quite disconcerting. However the delightfully delicious food combined with a hungry monster growling in our bellies, we would have been in some " khooni panja" guest house with vultures instead of flies and we would have barely stopped the satiating transition from hand 2 mouth.