Fools’ day losing its charm….

Whether we are astute or not, it gives an immense feeling of proud to prove that some one else is a fool. And April1st is meant for doing that.

April 1st was like a Holi for most of the school students of Tamilnadu a few years back. A state which doesn’t celebrate Holi was celebrating (so-called) fools’ day in full swing, especially in villages. In my Elementary and High School, the preparation for fools’ day used to take almost a week.

Camlin blue and red ink, the milk like liquid from the madar plant (erukkam ilai in Tamil), finely pulverized powder of Black Myrobalan (kadukkai in Tamil), little bit of Turmeric powder and few other ingredients (company secret, cannot be revealed ). If all these are mixed in proper proportions which is only known to the experts*, gives you a liquid which once sprayed on the dress, the stain created cannot be removed by any popular detergent powder available today. Even the laundry person cannot do any magic!

Another way to make others fools is by putting a permanent ‘AF’ mark on their back (AF stands for April Fool). This is achieved by etching the inverse of AF in a big potato, dipping the potato in the same liquid prepared earlier and stamping on the person who deserves it . These celebrations were slowly losing their appeal in front of my eyes for many reasons. The school teachers were totally against these kind of jubilations , examinations were preponed to the first week of April by the state government, and the interest level of the students was coming down rapidly.

After I moved to Madurai, I was hardly able to see any such celebrations. But in my vicinity every one would try to tell some lie and make me a fool. But since from my childhood I have seen a lot like that, I never fallen into their traps (thank God for that). Even in newspapers they used to put some unbelievable news on the first page and in the last page we will realise that they have made us fools. For the past few years I am not seeing any interesting thing happening on 1st April except for some forward mails (especially ‘I am getting married’ mail, God, I am bored of it).

This year, even that was missing. No one tried to fool me from the morning. No forward emails. No ‘Happy Birthday to U Fool’ SMSs. No traps in news papers. No fictitious news on Internet. Man! It was the most boring April 1st I have ever had in my life. When February 14 is becoming widely popular, the blurring fame of April 1st puts me off. Or is it because every one thinks that ‘When I myself* is a big fool why should I try to prove that some one else is a fool?’.

P.S: You can share your fools’ day experiences here…

* – That includes me too baby…

Fools’ day losing its charm….

Whether we are astute or not, it gives an immense feeling of proud to prove that some one else is a fool. And April1st is meant for doing that.

April 1st was like a Holi for most of the school students of Tamilnadu a few years back. A state which doesn’t celebrate Holi was celebrating (so-called) fools’ day in full swing, especially in villages. In my Elementary and High School, the preparation for fools’ day used to take almost a week.

Camlin blue and red ink, the milk like liquid from the madar plant (erukkam ilai in Tamil), finely pulverized powder of Black Myrobalan (kadukkai in Tamil), little bit of Turmeric powder and few other ingredients (company secret, cannot be revealed ). If all these are mixed in proper proportions which is only known to the experts*, gives you a liquid which once sprayed on the dress, the stain created cannot be removed by any popular detergent powder available today. Even the laundry person cannot do any magic!

Another way to make others fools is by putting a permanent ‘AF’ mark on their back (AF stands for April Fool). This is achieved by etching the inverse of AF in a big potato, dipping the potato in the same liquid prepared earlier and stamping on the person who deserves it . These celebrations were slowly losing their appeal in front of my eyes for many reasons. The school teachers were totally against these kind of jubilations , examinations were preponed to the first week of April by the state government, and the interest level of the students was coming down rapidly.

After I moved to Madurai, I was hardly able to see any such celebrations. But in my vicinity every one would try to tell some lie and make me a fool. But since from my childhood I have seen a lot like that, I never fallen into their traps (thank God for that). Even in newspapers they used to put some unbelievable news on the first page and in the last page we will realise that they have made us fools. For the past few years I am not seeing any interesting thing happening on 1st April except for some forward mails (especially ‘I am getting married’ mail, God, I am bored of it).

This year, even that was missing. No one tried to fool me from the morning. No forward emails. No ‘Happy Birthday to U Fool’ SMSs. No traps in news papers. No fictitious news on Internet. Man! It was the most boring April 1st I have ever had in my life. When February 14 is becoming widely popular, the blurring fame of April 1st puts me off. Or is it because every one thinks that ‘When I myself* is a big fool why should I try to prove that some one else is a fool?’.

P.S: You can share your fools’ day experiences here…

* – That includes me too baby…

Its (not) the time to disco…

Phew!…so many serious topics in this blog and my Tamil blog have almost made me a very serious person..I seem to be losing my sense of humor…Damn…I thought I should some how get out of this maniac…was thinking over and over again for a lighter topic and finally ferreted out this one from my mental archives…when my life itself has so many funny things, why to look for humor outside?…

Its all about my first and till date the only discotheque experience…It was the day before Diwali…a Friday…in a city like Cardiff, a day in the tail weeks of October is never that cold…the thought just came in our mind when we were discussing about the development of ECR in Chennai and the discotheques it has…one of our friends suggested that we should also check out a discotheque here…for most of us its supposed to be the first time to a disco…and we had some veterans too, who were fortifying our confidence levels there by making a big group of people ready for the action…one of our friends was coming from Ipswich to spend the Diwali weekend with us…we asked him to come a bit early so that he can join the party too..

A hell lot of discussions went on for the whole afternoon…what to wear?, what not to wear?…will they allow T-Shirts or should it be formals?…and as per what our seasoned disco colleagues suggested, we all decided to come in formal attire…all of us were staying in the same locality in the nearby streets…we all gathered at the Dispenser Garden (a small park in front of our house) at 10 after dinner and headed towards Millenium Stadium Mall which has the Riza pub & discotheque…again it was a suggestion from one of the veterans to go there out of all the available discos in Cardiff…

we bought the tickets entered Riza…the light was dim and iridescent…there was some heavy metal kinda music being played which made us to shout in the highest possible pitch to convey anything to our friends…it looked like the Indralogam I have seen in our old Tamil movies…I mean, it was smoke every where, and not in any other aspect…again as per our veterans advice every body bought some drinks and I bought a pint of Coke…we sat on a table to watch what is going on before getting into action…they call it getting adapted to the milieu…

UK is known for weekend partying…almost all the cities and towns have many pubs and discs and throng gather at these places on Fridays and Saturdays…most of the Brits leave office by 3 on Friday to have a delightful weekend with their family or girl-friend or vice-versa…you can’t get a seat in a restaurant for dinner on a Friday…I have seen a queue for nearly a mile to enter a discotheque in London at midnight 12:30…and you can see the college and school students turning themselves into road side dancers on Fridays…they simply enjoy their life to the maximum possible extent as if tomorrow doesn’t exist…

quite a digression…coming back to the topic, since it was just around 10:15-10:20 there wasn’t much crowd at Riza…there were few old couples trying to make some Salsa steps for the rock music making everyone of us scoff…we were blabbering for almost 30 minutes before our Ipswich friend joined us…it was 11 and still the disc was only half-filled..out of them 90% were bald headed old men and portly British ladies…at 11:15 a big group of old ladies entered the disc in a boisterous manner…one of them were in Cindrella costume (OMG…Cindrella costume for an elephant) with a Happy-Birthday hat…like a coup taking over the government that group has taken over the entire place (actually the place was insufficient for all of them)…they started dancing and the building seemed to be in sync with them too…we have taken our glasses in hand from the table to save their life as the table was also dancing…

there came a cake of Himalayan size…with a big candle 47 on its center…the birthday baby (sorry…barrel) stormed off the candle and cut the cake…after everyone in their group has had the cake their frolicking became out of control…all fast steps which they cannot even imagine with their body size came out because of the alcohol which went inside..DAMAALLL…within a jiffy, the Sofa I was sitting was razed down as one of the fat ladies fell on that…thank God, my friend has dragged me out or else I would have become Chutney…thats the utmost level of our tolerance…when we all turned towards the same direction, as expected, the veteran who had suggested the place was missing…later we came to know that it was half price on Fridays in some other discos because of which the young gangs usually go to those and the old ones (plump by default) come to this disc…do I need to explicitly tell that the veteran has got his share of crackers on the Diwali day?