Westin Sohna: Arrival
22nd Nov 2018
Fly Amsterdam – Delhi. Arrive Delhi 1:30 AM, meet Priya who arrives 1 hour earlier and waits for me. The giggling and silliness starts. We have a mini layover at a hotel, and Priya is anxious not to miss the lunch at the resort. I realize she’s been dreaming of Indian food as much as I have been! At 11 am or so, we make our way in a pre-booked cab to the resort. Familiar but nearly forgotten sights along the way… “Those yellow fields are mustard” I say to Priya. “At least I think that’s mustard… ” to which the cabbie responds confirming that it indeed is sarson.
We reach in the afternoon and are immediately surrounded by warm welcomes and hugs. Pramad is at the reception, and also KD. I feel light headed and giddy with the yearbook compliments 🙂
KD wants me to make a pic of him and Pramad working – they strike a serious pose around his laptop, but Pramad bursts out laughing – so much for a serious working pic! Thus starts the first of over a thousand pics that I would make over these 3 days!
Soon a flock of others arrive – Ruchi, Sathya, Chinnu among them. It’s a confused chaotic happy free for all with hugs and selfies and everyone talking at the same time. It takes us a good 30 mins to get to the lunch hall from the entrance. At that moment, standing in the warm Delhi sun, I feel this is so… right! I accept that I am not going to know or recognize most of the boys, and some of the girls – but luckily everyone apparently feels this way.
Just as Pramad said some months ago, “It is about renewing your connections, making new connections… It’s all about the people”. For me, it is also about the place and the feelings Pilani and the campus invoke in me. But we’ll come to that later – for now it’s about reconnecting and catching up. Funny thing is, the catching up does not feel superficial at all – even with batchmates that I never interacted with on campus, it just feels natural.
We pounce on the food and cherry-pick all the Indian dishes and the desserts. Yummmm… the desserts are so sinfully, evilly delicious! They are a continuous theme throughout the 3 days.
I go to sit at one of the large round tables inside with my plate. A bunch of girls are sitting there. Can’t remember much of the conversation but it was all ice-breaking mode. Everyone just catching up with old friends and getting to know new friends. It’s a fluid seating arrangement – when I go to get seconds, my seat at that table is taken, and I join another table.
Bindu and I stand in the middle of the lawn chatting. It’s so wonderful to catch up and share old secrets and new ones, as if the 25 years in between just didn’t happen! We share a joke about some of my recent silliness, we look at each other, we know what the other is thinking – we burst out laughing. Will I ever live down my various idiocies?
After that Bindu makes it her mission to report on me to the rest of our wingies. Ruchika and Priya walk towards me with evil grins, and I immediately know they’ve heard about my latest outbreak of foot-in-mouth. “B*&#$%^” I mouth at them, and then the three of us start laughing uncontrollably, clutching our sides.
We wander back indoors where the large tables are. Someone – Vikrant Kobla, I think – is handing out sheets of printouts. Wtf? Are we recreating the days of surprise quizzes??!! Apparently, it’s a replay of “Brain of BITS” – only now, someone has coined a clever new name for this quiz: “BITS of Brain” ? Indeed.
I am sitting next to Swapna, one of the daads of our batch. We are supposed to fill the quiz out in pairs – so I ask her, but it’s not her scene, she declines with a polite laugh. Sudipa is on my other side, and she’s my next victim. She sportingly lets me add her name to the sheet. I recall a lot of giggling and silly answers. We fill it in quickly and light-headedly, and hand it in. I come back to check in 15 mins – have they announced the winners?! Sudipa is quite shocked: “What? Were you expecting to win??!!” 😀
