The firm flew us to the royal city of Udaipur for an offsite - or as understood in ELP temporary shifting of office for a few days......I was left off the previous day at midnight only after i promised to read the documents I had drafted overnight...but considering there was no night left the promise seemed stupid...so I reached home at 1, packed my bags, compressed 8 hrs of sleep into 2, woke up at 4 in the morning and ran to the airport to catch the 6 o clock flight....so in between all the packing and running around I hardly got anything constructive done .... except for noticing the new spanky Jet Airways counter ...making its poor cousin Indian Airlines look even poorer...........am a total Indian Airlines fan....not cos of its public sector status but cos they remind us that service is not about looking good but about being served good....ofcourse when you have someone looking like Aishwarya Rai/John Abraham serving you you are more likely to forgive her/him than anyone else if the soup lands on your head rather than on the tray.....anyways moving on....
and once we landed we were assigned our respective rooms at our very own royal palace overlooking the lake....my room for some strange reason had a chinese theme to it....maybe the hotel's idea was to make me feel chinese in an Indian way...well not that I had any time to feel chinese or anything else for that matter...we were soon caught up in a session of talking about the firm and its values....with just 2 hours of sleep they could have been talking about the latest celebrity gossip and I wouldnt have blinked an eyelid...and at the end of the session we were asked what word comes to our mind .... well no need to scratch your brains for that one... Sleep was the clear winner...
Udaipur trip also coincided with my b'day....I heralded my b'day dancing with my office colleagues at a royal hunting lodge...and woke up in the chinese room facing Udaipur lake next day and tried to contemplate the meaning of being in the right side of 30...well quite frankly I doubt whether there is any meaning ..and I doubt even more whether I would want to know ....so I did the next best thing....went for a full Kerala massage in Udaipur!!!........where I tried to pretend I was not from Kerala in the hope of listening in on what the ladies were saying about me...I mean what better way to hear about yourself than eavesdropping....but my accent gave away my mallu identity the moment I opened my mouth...well after that it was total bonding about Kerala and mallus....
Also went for a stroll around the palace to imbibe the history..and Shiks this palace reminded me so much of the Alhambra in Spain......similar gardens, similar figures of lions-except that the lion here was smiling ..was told that the lion was smiling cos he had seen so many pretty women that day....well ladies that clarifies the question for us...males of any species are the same ..... with a lion at least nobody will rob your house ...
The flight back was a little more exciting than expected...leveraging on my b'day I asked to see the cockpit...which they graciously allowed....much to our surprise we were actually being flown by a Russian Pilot....who seemed totally cut off from all the attention we were giving him..and an Indian pilot who couldnt stop grinning from ear to ear from all the attention....in the five seconds that we were there they told us which lever to pull to get the flight off the ground...I guess in an emergency I can at least take the flight off the ground .....so what if I have to live in an adrift plane for the rest of my life...
Coming back to Mumbai was however the best....especially since my b'day celebrations still continued after I landed.......but regally and legally speaking the trip was all in all a good one.....I lived in a Chinese room in a Rajasthani Palace, ate italian pasta cooked in a royal kitchen, had a Kerala massage and was finally flown back by a Russian pilot!!..totally cosmo experience dont you think? Not a bad way to start your 3rd decade I would say....
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