For years, I have always sported a really short crop, so short that it always looked like I was recovering from a recent tonsure. To speak the truth, I was scared of my hair. It was harder than coir and more unwieldy than the wildest weed. The barber must have cursed his luck everytime I stepped in for a hair-cut and this was pretty often. A little more than ground-level and there I would be getting my hair cut. I made sure that the hair was cut as short as the scissors could handle - value for money was definitely not the motivation. All this was until about a few months ago, when I stopped by the limelite salon (yes, it's a salon). My hair-stylist (yes, a stylist. I don't pay 200 bucks to call him a barber) cut my hair a little lesser than what I wanted. He didn't actually have to convince me to leave it just a little bit longer, though. Thus, I sported the "medium-length" hair for a while.

The devil, then, took me and I did the unthinkable. My hair "missed" a few appointments, three and a half months worth of them. Millions of gallons of hair gel and conditioner were used up during this period (Alright, that's overtly exaggerated!!). No, I did not want a ponytail. No, I couldn't even carry off the longer-by-a-few-centimeters hair. Nevertheless, I decided to soldier on and ignore the laments of my mom, the mocks of the others, the snigger of my friends and the "is that a new hair-cut?" jokes.

It felt nice to finally feel the wind in my hair. This happened during a train trip back to Bangalore. I was at the door trying to get chennai (no offense please) out of my system with a dose of the moonlit scenery, salty air and Bob Dylan singing "Blowin in the Wind" (No, I am not sure if it was that song but it would've fit in with the scene). There was a nice wind galloping right next to the length of the train. Without much strain, the wind could find my patch of hair and rush through it cutting through them like those guys always seem to do in "Lost". I found it immensely pleasurable to notice that the wind was able to mess with my hair. Yes, it felt nice. Hell, it felt great. So what if I looked weird with all that hair! Ahh, so this is what hair in the wind felt like?

Now that I had experienced the rebellious version of my hair, I was happy to fix up an appointment for my hair. I am back at medium length now. Yes, it still looks weird, but who cares!!

P.S: Don't get the wrong idea from my exaggerated use of the word "long". The word was used in complete relativity. The word "rebellious" was however used in the true sense. My hair is rebellious.

That's a de-facto question when people learn that I live alone in a house equipped with a stove, LPG connection and a myriad of utensils. My reply would always be, "Na. Used to cook, then didn't one day and the next and the next...." Truth be told, I rather enjoy the cooking part. What I don't enjoy is the painstaking brutal butchery of the vegetables. If only the veggies come in shapes that are suitable for cooking. Strips of carrot, quartered potatoes, sliced tomatoes, sliced onions. I have heard you can buy pre-cut vegetables, but I didn't bother to learn more about them. The biggest excuse I had to avoid cooking was the fact that I had to cook for one and I did not have a refrigerator to stow away extra portions. I hated the smirk that invariably bejewelled the veggie-wallahs face when I asked for "50gms of onion, 1 (exactly one) chilly, 1 stalk of curry leaves, 100gms of potato and 50gms of tomato". I am sure they found it funny. I didn't.

My cooking experience ranges across a number of 1-month periods. Some excuse or the other would save me from it and there I would be, back at the take-away. What did I make during the 1-month periods? Potato sambar, potato sagu, fried potato, potato stew. Yep, you guessed it. It was almost always a starchy potato meal. Did you guess why? Bingo!! Potatoes are easier to store. No refrigeration required.

So when the new fridge arrived most of my excuses had to be binned. In a way, I was glad that I made the buy. The curries I had to have everyday were killing me with their untasteable flavours. That's one thing I hate about the food here, every flavour tends to come in the way of the other and at the end of the meal all you can taste is a certain numbness of the taste-buds.

Now my kitchen is stocked with extra-virgin olive oil, brined olives, veggies - tomatoes, green peppers, baby corn, potatoes (can't ditch them, can I?), beet-root, salad dressings, cheese (no, I don't love cheese too much), milk (good milk in carton!), frozen fish, tomato puree, penne pasta. Yep, everything you need to whip up a great salad or dish out a nice fish. Not in fist-sized portions anymore!

So do I cook? Yes, I do. I don't know for how much longer, because first-and-foremost I am pretty lazy.

It was the 1st of July, 2002. No, I think I should rewind back a day. 30 June, 2002. That is the day I landed in Bangalore to take up my job with Oracle. I had met and knew 4 other people who would join with me. Murali, Karthik (Skely), Durga (DD) and Sangeetha. As it turned out, we were a total of 19 people that would spend, together, the next few months in training. We were to stay in a hotel for a while. Hotel Harsha Park Inn. That sunday I met a few of the others in the hotel - Guneet, Karthikeyan (Chells), Rajiv and others.

Finally, the day dawned. We were all packed into taxis and shipped to Oracle. We hadn't been to Oracle yet and all of us were pretty excited to see the building. Skely got to his antics the moment we landed there. He almost crashed through the glass walls at the entrance.

That day sitting in a conference room, we began to form the bonds. We were a mix of people, from different places, different colleges, different views. One thing was common though, we were just out of college and this was our first job. And we were very excited about getting into Oracle. We took the first step into the true adult world together. Like soldiers in a fancy parade.

Let me take some space to describe the people.

Anu - the patriot, very passionate about Sachin and Abdul Kalam.
Anuj - the chubby guy, who went from fair to pink to red when we ribbed him.
DD - the sweet talker, who would later talk people into finishing the extra food.
Debarun - the mimic and a movie fanatic. Dada, we call him, in Bengali style.
Guneet - the people guy, who made friends with almost everyone around.
Karthik (Skely) - the funny guy. always ends up doing things wrong.
Karthikeyan (Chells) - the gamer, without 'Th' in his vocabulary.
Manish - the guy who got most linked to our female-tutors, by us.
Murali - the all-round helpful guy.
Prakash(CP) - the techie and the brainee. Unix fan.
Prashanth - the guy who used his fifth drink and sixth sense to get to seventh heaven.
Preethi - the no-nonsense girl with a smile.
Rajiv - the intellectual and the speaker.
Rupsa - a close second to swati in terms of childishness. chocolate fanatic.
Sangeetha - the silent one and eats the least. She still is the same.
Santhosh - the thinker. Thinks too much and mostly philosophically.
Swati - the kid in the group. Also an eater, "petu".
Vijay - the handsome dude with a winning smile. that's what most girls thought of him anyway.
As for me, I learnt that I had come across as 'frightening'. I haven't figured that out yet. :-)

We spent three months together in training rooms. Most of us, anyway. It was like being back in college. Classes, naps during classes, a hundred coffee breaks (that's exaggerated, ofcourse). Lunch would see almost all of us crowded around the same table. We would sit around, talk, laugh and have fun during our lunch breaks. I guess everyone in Oracle must have noticed this bunch of "kids".

I would dare say that I have never felt so close to any group of peers; neither in school nor in college. We became almost like a family - a big, boisterous, loud, fun family. Everyone of us was away from home, some of us by thousands of kilometers. This group was our family away from home.

Anuj was the first to leave. He got himself transferred to Hyderabad. Swati followed later. She didn't want to go, but that's what she had to do. We had all known each other only for a few months, but the day swati got the news there was a stillness in the group. It was a sad day. It was fate's way of telling us that we cannot be together forever. About a year and a half later, Guneet quit Oracle. Though he is still in Bangalore, we don't get to see much of him. Then Rajiv left to do his MBA at IIM, Ahmedabad. He had been my roomie for close to two years and a great roomie to have. A few months after this, there was a mass exodus to Amdocs, Cyprus. Prof, CP and Santhosh left for Cyprus.

We were then just a handful left - a mere shadow of the original set. But we made the most of everything and continued to be together as often as we could. This past friday, Rupsa gave us her farewell treat. She is going to Calcutta. A sad day it was, yet we laughed and smiled. After all, we didn't know when we would get another chance to laugh together.

I can only hope that all of us manage to continue being in touch through mails or phone calls; no matter where we are. And that, someday we would get a chance to get together again. All of us together, making the loudest possible noise.

Borrowing Rupsa's quote - "To meet and to part is the fate of life; to part and to meet is the hope".