Of New Year wishes, text messages and disturbed sleeps...

This post must have been out at least five days earlier. But then, I decided to wait until I got my computer in. So since three times two is six, i have got a new comp in my room. That was about three days ago, when TJ suddenly said, OK we'll get a comp today and whooooosh... there was a comp in both our rooms after making us poorer by a few grand. So, I have this ergonomic keyboard and all, and it's amazing fun to see that the text appears the way I type it and not otherwise as with the one back home, the one that seemingly has a mind of it's own.

New Year time is when people actually rediscover most of their friends and relatives and then suddenly you have an assumed lost fifth cousin coming up with a nice e-card to your mailbox, or some not-seen-or-heard-of since last January aunt who never fails to remark how much you have grown since your fifth birthday calling you up. All in all it feels good to have people remembering you. This New Year, I got quite a few wishes on my barely six months old mobile phone. One of them, however was an anonymous one, which ran to about two-and-a-half screens. It sounded extremely nice and wished me well. Now, apart from feeling happy, I also felt curious, very curious. I mean, no one actually spams you with nice messages. Spams are mostly corny, but this one was nice. However, packing my bags for college got the better of my curiosity and I promptly forgot about the message, until about six days back when I saw it again while I was lazily looking through my then congested Inbox to see what messages that I could delete. So there was the message, my sim-card had been recharged and I got my curiosity back!

Then I did what any curious person would have done. I messaged the author back asking who he was. My message was something like :

Hi there, New Year wishes to you too. But then… may i know who you are? Your name is not in my phone book.

Five minutes and thirty seven seconds passed. (OK kidding! I did not time!) and then my mobile beeped the Walk of Life and I knew, the identity was to be revealed in seconds. With bated breath and sweaty palms (OK that did not happen either!) I opened the message. It said

Vijay Kumar!

Osarsk!

Infy!

TTYL

I have to tell you two things here. One, I did not realize that it was past midnight when I sent him that message. Two, I did not know what TTYL meant!

Realization dawned on me- that the anon well-wisher, was really Vijay. Unluckily for him I still had not realized that it was past midnight. With the true delight of having discovered the identity of my anon well-wisher, I sent him another message.

Hell, sorry da. I had the last digit of your number wrong.

And this time there was no reply for fifteen minutes and fifty seven seconds (I timed this time around!) and it still had not dawned on me that the time was now closer to one than twelve. So, I was really concerned and all, and also thought it would be nice if Vijay reads my blog and all. So I sent him a message asking him to read my blog sometime, you like when he is free or something. I also asked him btw what does TTYL mean.

Vijay by now was well and truly like the his silver screen namesake, as played by Amitabh Bachchan- the angry young man! He sent me a reply that went something like,

It means talk to you later. And not at this royally uncivilized hour. Send your reply to this tomorrow. Shall read your blog .

Of course, I was clearly a sane man and it was really clear this time that it was a royally uncivilized hour. So I decided to do what most civilized people like me do- I went to bed!

The next day was largely uneventful, as in devoid of any event. We generally waited for the prof to turn up. And he didn’t! This was in two classes out of the four that we had that day and the remaining two were spent, half asleep past the halfway mark!

Then I came back and did what one generally does if one had woken up at 5:30 that morning and gone for a real refreshing morning jog ( needless to say, I did that!)- I slept. I was still sleeping when I got a call from some vague number that looked almost like Vijay’s number (the right one) but for the second last digit. He was, visibly (whatever that is over the phone) angry because some message from my number, that apologized for having got his number wrong had reached him at 12:30 last night.

Even the marginally bright reader would have figured out what had happened. From Vijay’s perspective, there is this school junior, some six years younger than him, sending him a message asking him who he was, in the middle of the night, and then about twenty minutes further into the night, a presumptuous one from the same guy asking him to read his blog! And the other guy, for no fault of his gets a message from some vague moron (reflecting the ideas of the receiver, have no congruence with mine!) telling him that he got his number wrong. And then, there was I.

Impatient to tell Vijay all about this, I did just that.Apart from being deliriously happy that someone actually interrupted my sleep he sent me a series of interesting responses

It was not midnight y’day dammit. It was today and have not slept ever since. Remind me to wake you up one night.

There you go Vijay, if you are reading this, you might be reminded of a task whiling it’s time away, in cold-storage. (You’d better leave it that way, though!)

This was followed by another one that went like

And don’t tell me you had the nerve to send that apology note In the night itself. I’ll skin you alive. @#$%^&* thank your stars I was a good 20 miles away. Else you would have been a would-have-been.

And then there was a lot of friendly banter that followed for the next couple of hours that included each of us wishing the other eternal impotency and a pleasant stay at hell. And then, I guess both of us were tired of messaging each other. Of course, I need not be telling you here that the next day, he read my blog and was highly impressed and…

And the clock says it’s time to go now.