Thank God, it’s Thursday

No hurried dressing-up, no scurrying for the first and best ones of the uttapams and idlis, no 8:50 or 8:55 or 9 o’clock bus to catch.

Thank God, it’s Thursday.

The clock ticks away, mobile phones cry out ‘alarm’-ingly in monophonic and polyphonic tones, reminding their masters of commitments and deadlines – MRM presentations, Visual Communication assignment, Photoshop paths and layers. Yawn!

Sometime close to noon, a head creeps out of floral prints and dishevelled hair. Throwing my pretty blanket aside, I sit up with a shock. Damn, missed breakfast again. This happens every Thursday. I turn to my right, Susy kutty is fast asleep. Is she snoring? To my left, Sammy Whammy lies on her bed like a defeated warrior. Cool, I’m the first one to wake up.

As I move about the place ‘noiselessly’, the other two heads pop out of blanketed enclosures. In a matter of a few minutes, everyone is on their feet, going about their respective chores. What follows is a series of logical and rational reasoning, in an attempt to find solutions. ‘How can they shut the mess room by 9.30? Breakfast should go on till 11, maybe even 12’, ‘They should provide bed-tea-breakfast’, ‘Maybe we should talk to Colonel?’ Absolutely pragmatic ideas and suggestions. We marvel at our own ingenuity. One leads to another. Not on a hungry stomach though, thanks to the abundant supply of cookies and chips and cakes in our room. Ya, ya, we come from ‘khaate peete khandaan’. We totally look the part. No denying that.

As Kishore Kumar and Abba and Sean Paul conduct a hopeless symphony in the background, we turn into ‘homemaker’ mode. Swinging and lip-syncing to the tunes of our respective idols, we go about our household chores – directing the cleaning lady not to miss that little corner there, instructing the laundry woman to handle the clothes delicately. At the end of the exercise, we look at the outcome proudly. We’ll make great home managers in the future.

Lunch time, and yes, we’re on time for that. After all, one can’t survive on snacks and savouries the whole day. Over roti, dal and curry, we discuss the politically volatile situation in the major cities of our country. ‘After all, FOOTPRINTS and CAMPUS OLYMPICS are team efforts’, ‘How can s/he behave like a dictator?’ We end our conference with a mention about the virtues of ‘people skills and collective responsibility’ and affirming the importance of event management. Yeah, way to go!

Back into our clean rooms, we decide to now utilise the time in a more productive manner. Settled on our respective beds with a book in hand, we turn the pages of history. Quite unconsciously, siesta takes us into the world of fact-based fiction – we roam through the streets of Lappierre’s City of Joy, swim through the waters of the Meenachal in Roy’s God of Small Things and ponder upon Desai’s (The) Better Man. Overcome by ‘intensity and purpose’, we decide to replace these novels with less-novel creations like Mass Communication In India or the like by you-know-who!!!

An unusually long period of ‘intensity and purpose’ puts us in philosophical mode. We ‘communicate’ in profound terms and discuss the vagaries of the male psyche. The study of mass communication has led us to dissect and critically analyze the words and thoughts of the ‘men in our lives’. Brooding over our unrealised/unfulfilled/uninteresting love lives, we sink into deeper thought at the cost of the peril of God knows who.

Dinner is followed by good night calls and long-distance kisses. What would we do without such doting families? Yet another day passes. Rather uneventful, just the way I like it. Thank God, it was a Thursday.