Back
home in Pune, like many medium-class households, we have one television set,
and usually the remote control is in the hands of mom in the morning for the
share market news and in evening/night with dad for news and some sit-coms. 99%
of the times it is SAB TV channel playing out at our home. So I sometimes miss out
watching How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men or the re-runs of other
English sit-coms. Torrent downloads or swapping hard-disks did enable for some
viewing on the computer, but with the available time it usually ended up in
watching a couple of episodes of a season. With quite a lot of free time over
the weekend here I am getting myself immersed in all the shows I love. I am currently on
the Season 5 of Two and a Half Men, Season 5 of How I Met Your Mother and Season 4
of That 70s Show, apart from Season 3 of 24. Though I do like a couple of
characters from FRIENDS, I am not very much fond of the overall show as such. A
friend here wanted me to start with LOST, but I haven’t yet. I prefer the
comedy genre over the others. By the way, there was a character with the name
Sudeep in one of the episodes of HIMYM :-)
We had a team builder event on one of the Fridays last
month. It was supposed to be a bowling alley event with a positive response
from 95% of the team members on the first day itself. But somehow the plan
changed to go to a food bank as volunteers. The second day the responses dropped
to 5%. I was also in the ‘not coming’ category because I was not sure if I was
going to be comfortable handling non-vegetarian food items while serving there,
and did not want to be a volunteer who turned up to do nothing. Then there was
an episode of HIMYM in which the characters Ted and Robin sift through dry
& packed boxes of food items in a food bank. So I made a call to the
organizer and she said that all food items will be sealed and there would be no
actual food serving there. Also another colleague insisted that since everyone
sits at different locations it would be a good chance to interact with others
considering that I had recently moved and very few in the team knew me. So I
went to the team builder event and there were many who did not know what was to
be done at the food bank.
She (seated next to Me at the assembly-point table): Hi!
I am She.
Me: Hi! I am Me.
She: Whose team are you working with?
Me: X’s team.
She: It is such a bad turnout for this event.
Me: Hmm, the bowling thing would have been more fun for
everyone.
She: Do you know what is to be done here?
Me: I have a very faint idea, but do you know how I met
your mother?
She (ecstatic): OMG, you are from Chennai? How and when
did you meet my mother?
Me: Err that didn’t turn out the way I was saying…
There were many other groups for volunteering and
every group was assigned to a different area in the food bank. By the way, all that
our group did was prepare the paper bags for the food delivery.
